Silhouette Advent Calendar

 I have to admit. This project nearly did me in.

It had such great promise when I spotted it out on the Silhouette blog shortly after Thanksgiving. It was a great price with all these little cutting files you can reuse for various holidays and gifts.

Little did I know that making little boxes isn't something I am good at.

The spray painting wasn't all that bad. It started off as white. And I of course wanted black.

I think that starting with the wrong glue kinda got me off on the wrong foot. Cutting the boxes wasn't all that bad either although it ate up large pieces of pretty paper. Towards the end I started using any paper that was pretty and the right colors and not necessarily Christmas like.

Turns out for me, the right glue is hot glue.

I was trying to use regular adhesive, but when subjected to small people removing lids to get to candy, it didn't work one bit.

Don't even ASK about the star and how that turned out. I found that on my counter in three pieces. Not ripped mind you, but not going back together no way no how. Avoided redoing the star to avoid further damage to my self esteem.

So, finished out Dec. by just placing candy in the little slots and promising myself to finish the project in January.

My mojo came back a bit when I came up with the idea of distressing my black spray paint a bit with sand paper.

I was further cheered up by finding these little itty bitty glittery letters at Walmart for a $1. Yippee for Stickos! (too bad I didn't notice they only had one #2, so had to beg my Sis In Law Jennifer to buy out her Walmart of stickers once I hit the higher numbers, so my cheap fix turned less cheap quickly!)

Came up with the idea for my numbers using a punch with two different circles to make them all similar. I thought that would help pull the whole thing together.

Do you see a trend here?

I love my Silhouette, but making little itty bitty cut outs on it were going to stress me to the max.

These boxes clearly needed little numbers in my brain. Although, I have spotted various other versions of this using much larger numbers as an accent.

I have also seen these boxes using only one line of product which makes them look nicely matching.

I was going for a bit vintage here with my paper choices and when I got these lovely glass ornaments from Chelsea, I was going to include them as well to display them.

I decided I would hide envelopes behind them and write activities in them next year. See the little clear envelope below?

Here is a close up of my largest box which I found in my stash that FITS for Day 25 and is super soft velvet!

Do you love that neato hand made flower on it from Irini? Yeah, me too!

Now the only addition I might make is if I find larger sized numbers in GOLD from Stickos for the front of Box 25. (hint hint Jennifer!!!)

So glad it's done, happy I did it, but I think next time I won't try to take on something like this AT CHRISTMAS!! I mean, what was I thinking!!

However, now is a great time to make one of these if it's winter where you live. If you are clever, make it something neutral where you can change out just a few items for the holiday and enjoy displaying it longer. If you are bad at little boxes, I would honestly use the easier version of making the pull out drawers. #15 and #20 are those and they were super easy to fold and glue. Plus, they are flush mounted so you don't have to tweak them to make the box look pretty.

If you want to display ornaments in the box like I did, glue dots work great for keeping them still.

And, I'm not being a hater, but those blog posts where they were takin' up this purchase? Pretty please next time throw me a couple hints on how to pull it together better. Nothing worse than UFOs in my book! That stands for UnFinished Projects!