The Ryttings take on a craft

This craft/activity came about rather spontaneously. I was looking around for advent calenders and hadn't really liked what I saw. I saw this idea for a homemade one on the buzzings of a queen bee's blog. I loved this idea and told Mckay about it, he's usually enthusiastic about my craft ideas but he really jumped on board with this one. We had it nearly finished by the end of Thanksgiving break. It was so much fun especially with Husband helping me :) He did the more manly things like cutting the wood for a frame and spray painting the boxes. I realize spray painting isnt really a manly job but I was a little scared to use it and mess up everything, hence, its a manly job.

The idea for this is pretty simple. We bought paper mache boxes at Roberts, I had no idea what these were or if thats what they were really called but I found them at Roberts pretty quick. The boxes came in different sizes and shapes so we got twenty five boxes in different shapes, one for each day. These boxes can then be decorated however you want, which is the fun part. You attach the magnet to the back of the box, paint a piece of sheet metal with magnetic paint and fit the sheet onto a frame.

This picture should be at the bottom of the post cuz its one of the last things we did but oh well. Once we had finished with all the boxes for the calender we figured it would be hard to find a frame to fit the exact dimensions of the sheet metal, so we went to Home Depot, bought a piece of moulding and Mckay cut it into a frame.


The boxes we chose to use were the middle-ish size, there were some smaller which would have worked too but they didnt have the variety of shapes I wanted. We spray painted the bottoms of the boxes a cranberry red.

Then we layed out the boxes and arranged them how we wanted and covered the lids with Christmas scrapbook paper.

We bought a piece of sheet metal from Home Depot and cut it to size, we painted the frame and thats it! I love it, and I love even more that Mckay helped me with it :)