Last year my children asked for Advent calendars I just couldn’t find in the shops. They asked for a Pokemon and Minecraft Advent calendar. They’ve always enjoyed opening their Advent calendars and I didn’t want to disappoint them, especially as they still believe the Elf on the Shelf makes them for them. As we couldn’t buy the Advent calendars we wanted we decided to make our own re-useable advent calendars that could be used again. Our idea was for a simple wooden box frame with 24 little Advent bags hanging from three wooden dowels which would contain Pokemon toys for my daughter, and a Minecraft Lego set for my son.

Equipment to make re-useable wooden advent calendars:

Compound mitre saw

Planed pine wood

Pine dowel

Primer and satinwood white paint

Picture frame clamp and clamps

Wood glue

24 Curtain clips

24 small hessian bags

Cricut Maker and vinyl

DIY re-useable wooden advent calendars

We wanted to make our wooden Advent calendars free standing so planned the shape we wanted, a simple rectangular frame with space for 8 bags to hang on each line. We bought the wood and cut the pieces needed to make the frame using a compound mitre saw.

The frame was really simple, with a larger piece at the top for each child’s name. We glued the frame together with wood glue and clamped it whilst it dried overnight using a picture frame clamp and clamps.

With the basic frame made, we drilled six holes for the dowel using a drill bit the same size as the dowel.

After a bit of filler in the gaps with wood filler and a quick sand, each frame was ready to be painted white.

Using my Cricut Maker I cut the children’s names from black everyday vinyl and applied it to the top of each frame.

I love this typeface and used it on a lot of my Christmas craft projects. Here’s how their personalised Advent calendars looked before the little bags were hung on each dowel.

I used by Cricut Maker to cut a set of 24 numbers for each set of gift bags from glitter vinyl and used my Cricut Easy Press to press them onto the bags. This took a while and I wrote about this is more detail, which you can read about in this post.

The last step was to fill the bags with the gifts I had bought my children before attaching the bags to the dowel using curtain clips. This meant the bags were easy to hang and remove by little fingers!