Kindness Acts Advent Calendar

Last year my daughter-in-law requested I make an Advent calendar for the family to count down the days to Christmas. She requested it late in November and I apologetically said that I could not accomplish that in such a short time since those calendars were a lot of work. Twenty-five of anything takes time, no matter how simple the task. So I was determined to make their family one for Christmas 2019.

I had seen a kit for a calendar from a vendor called The Whole Country Caboodle when I was at The Houston Quilt Festival with my daughter in 2017. My daughter bought the panel only from the kit along with some half yards of coordinating fabrics. She said she did not have enough wall space to make the entire kit, the finished size of which would be 40” x 58” once the suggested concentric borders had been added.

The panel alone consisted of three areas: the Glad Tidings header, the Pockets, and the Acts of Kindness Labels.

The remainder of the kit consisted of fabric for the borders. It also came with shipping tags to which the acts of kindness labels would be attached before being inserted in each of the pockets.

Suffice it to say, the cuteness of that kit kept calling to me long after the Houston show, and, once I was back home, I ordered one online to make for my daughter-in-law, my son, and their three kids. First I bordered the Glad Tidings header with a tan star fabric and then a black fabric with tiny holly leaves. I also made four pinwheels for the corner blocks also using that black holly mini-print and a cream star print.

Then I tackled those twenty-five pockets. I ironed each row of five onto a strip of HeatnBond. HeatnBond is a paper backed, iron-on, no-sew, double-sided adhesive for bonding fabric to fabric without needing to pin. Then I sewed the top edge of that strip to a strip of pocket lining fabric, right sides together, peeled off the paper backing, flipped the lining fabric to the back of the pocket, and ironed the two layers together to form a substantially weighted pocket. I then trimmed the two side raw edges and the one lower raw edge of each pocket using a rotary cutter with a pinking blade. I sewed the pockets onto a tan colored rectangle of fabric. Pinning in place would have been difficult through that stiff pocket so I Scotch taped each one in place instead.

I added the Glad Tidings header to the upper edge.

To this central unit I added a green inner border, red outer border, and the four pinwheel corner blocks. This next photo shows a closeup of the pocket attachment as well as the added borders.

I made the twenty five acts of kindness tags using the HeatnBond but this time affixing the fabric to the shipping labels that came in the kit.

I spray-basted the top, batting, and backing layers together. I process half at a time and use pillowcases to prevent my floor from the overspray of the Odif Usa 505 Spray and Fix Temporary Fabric Adhesive. I used to spread newspapers but they would move around and rip if I walked on them. These pillowcases work better and afterward I just toss them in the laundry.

My quilting was very simple using my domestic, and I avoided the temptation to free-motion quilt on my Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen. Timely completion rather than over-embellishment was my goal. At the border seams I added a line of stitch in the ditch using my specialty stitch-in-the ditch pressure foot with a leading blade that really helps keep the stitching in the ditch.

In between the pockets I did a zig zag stitch of the same stitch length and stitch width to echo the pinking on the pocket edges. I did a flanged binding since I wanted a flash of bright green to distract from the potential somberness of an all-black binding.

I slipped one act of kindness label in a pocket to check for size. It fit fine and the pocket spacing was great too, height-wise.

I added a sleeve for hanging on the top of the back and a label with my initials and year in a lower corner of the back.

I was waiting for the sun to come out to take an outdoor picture but even in sunny California that was not possible during a week of torrential rains in late November. My husband stepped in to help with my indoor photo session in our upstairs hallway under the skylight.

I had two yards of this gorgeous Jason Yenter Winter Solstice print that I was saving for some special project. It was almost too pretty to use on a back but the colors and theme matched so perfectly I declared this project suitably special.

I packed the complete Kindness Calendar a box and sent it off to arrive at its destination November 29th, in time to deploy December 1st this season. I enclosed a note with it.

There is a bit of a back story to this project. I wanted grandchildren from both families to be able to have this calendar Christmas 2019. My daughter had not bought the kit, only the panel when we were together at the Houston Quilt Festival. This meant as well as the calendar assembly, she had to make design decisions which, at least in my case, always further slows down progress. She also has two small children, so her time is limited. To speed up her creation and assembly time, I offered to prepare the pockets and kindness labels for her. Clearly this is only a mechanical help and would not tromp on her creative toes. When, post-Houston, I ordered the kit for my daughter-in-law, I ordered another panel for my daughter, not wanting to wait for her to find the time to mail me the panel she already had. Border fabrics were not a problem since my daughter already had those. But the kit conveniently came with the stringed shipping labels for the kindness tags, supposedly available at any stationery store. Not quite so. After an exhaustive local and online search I had to order a quantity of 100 tags and they came with wire, not string, that had to be switched out. I grumbled that my daughter should have just bought the kit and I would have happily taken the extra border fabric off her hands. I would most certainly prefer fabric to 75 extra shipping tags with wires!

But grumbling aside, I am now visiting her in Oklahoma trying to distract grandchildren while she is assiduously working to make her calendar creation come to life. Perhaps she too will post about it in her blog RobinLovesQuilting.blogspot.com. Here is a sneak peek. She chose to border her Glad Tidings header in a deep red for a totally different look.

Amusing Side Note:
I found this 2010 “Mental Floss” website titled A Brief History of Advent Calendars. It is fun and interesting to read. The headings within the article are

• What is Advent?
• Advent Calendar Origins
• The First Printed Advent Calendars
• I Like Ike and Ike Likes Advent Calendars
• The $50,000 Advent Calendar
• The World’s Largest Advent Calendar
• The Advent Calendar for Web Geeks
• The LEGO Advent Calendar
• Hubble Space Telescope

It was followed by the updated 2019 article Why Does Advent Calendar Chocolate Taste Different?. Hmmm... why?