Saturday, November 19, 2011

It's Christmas... Countdown Calendar

A number of years ago, I picked up a "Karen Foster's" countdown calendar but had never done anything with it... that is until today...

Last weekend I was looking through the November/December 2011 edition of Creating Keepsakes Magazine & came across an add featuring this product. It inspired me to pull the unopened package out of my closet & start looking for paper to use in order to complete this project. I couldn't find any paper in my stash, so I went to Michael's... that's when I came across K&Company's  "Elizabeth Brownd Visions of Christmas 12x12 Designer Paper Pad" & knew that this is what I was looking for...


If you clicked on the link above, you can see that there are half circles on the front of each of these 25 little boxes in order to make it easier to pull out the tiny box & see what is inside. As I didn't want to take away from the picture, I decided not to cut out these notches but had to come up with some other way to remove the boxes so I decided instead to add knobs that would be strong enough to pull on but wouldn't tear the paper... That's when I decided to use brads as little knobs!!

I didn't have enough of 1 colour, so I had to come up with some sort of pattern in order to use 2 different colours... I started by placing 2 gold brads on the boxes followed by 1 brown one & continued this pattern.

For those of you that really know me... you know that I'm a bit of a perfectionist... I like things to be just right... so I just had to come up with an "eye pleasing" arrangement for the placing of these brads, so I did what I often do... I opened up Excel & start playing!! :-)

As mentioned above, my first attempt was "C" below, but as you can see, it just doesn't look right... "B" is the opposite of "C" but "A" is just right & that is the pattern I went with!! :-)


So once I had my design, I just had to figure out how I was going to attach them.

I first attached the paper to the box & then punctured a hole in each of them, putting the brad through the paper & the cardboard. If I closed the brad tight against the box, it was hard to get a handle on the knob in order to pull the box out of it's drawer, so I had to leave enough room to get my nail under it & pull it out!

Now I can put a "little" something into each of these boxes & know that we will be able to open them up on the appropriate date!!

Oh that reminds me... as you can see I didn't put a number on the box... label them 1 through 25... again I decided against this because I didn't want to take away from the picture...

Thanks for reading this looonngg post!! Hope it inspired you to try something new...

Till next time... Happy Scrapping!! :-)

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