Christmas Countdown Calendar

Only one more day until December 1st and we are ready to count down to Christmas!!  I am sad to say, that we have been using this pitiful, Christmas tree shaped advent calendar that I bought about 4 years ago on clearance at Michael's.  Well this year, I decided I was going to buy one of the new advent calendars with the little pull out boxes and decorate it myself.  Once I got going, I realized it was probably going to take me until next Christmas to get that crazy thing put together and decorated.  So, I "scrapped" that idea!  At this point, I had no clue what I was going to do, but was determined not to bring out the clearance calendar!!  I decided at that point, that it was time to head over to Pinterest.  I found a fun project, that I thought I could easily do, and got to work getting the few supplies I would need.  After finding this fun frame idea on Pinterest, I even saw it pop up on FaceBook and definitely knew that's what I wanted to do.  So here is a look, at what I ended up creating:

 
And here's what I did to create this project:

*I bought a 12x18 inch frame at Michael's (this one was $5 with their coupon)
*I also got a bottle of Citrus Green spray paint at Michael's ($6)
*The binder clips were purchased at Dollar Tree (you could also use mini clothes pins or large paper clips, in place of the binder clips)
*Before I spray painted the frame, I roughed up the wood with some sand paper
*Make sure you safely discard the glass from your frame.  You won't need it.
*Once the frame was completely dry, I cut 5 strips of black ribbon with White Polka dots, a little longer than the opening of the frame.  The width of this ribbon is 1.25 inches.  You could also use canvas or wire across the opening of your frame.
*Then I flipped the frame over and laid out all 5 pieces of the ribbon and evenly spaced
them.  Then I just took my stapler and stapled the ribbon to the back side of the frame.
*Now, you can get to the fun part...making the tags or "holders" for your numbers.  I just dug into my stash for a variety of products.  And I put my brand new Silhouette Cameo to work!!  I used Thickers for all of the numbers...because I never use those for some reason, only the alphas!!

Voila!!  I was able to finish this whole project within about a 4 hour time frame...spread out over the day of course, because my children would never give me 4 hours straight to get anything done!!  :)

And one of my favorite things about this project, is that it will double as a Halloween Countdown Calendar.  We have never done a Halloween Countdown Calendar in the past, but our middle daughter drove me completely insane this year, asking everyday for a month, if it was Halloween yet.  Hence, a countdown calendar for Halloween next year!  I thought it would be great to do the bright green paint, with the black & white ribbon, because it would work for Halloween and Christmas.  Once I create the Halloween tags, I will be able to save both sets and use them from year to year.

Our plan for this calendar, is to remove a number for each day, as it passes, so the kids will know how many days are left til Christmas.  I am sure that it still probably won't stop them from asking everyday, "Is it Christmas yet??!!"