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?

Christmas Elf Hats

Last February I ordered five Top This! Elf hats and five Top This! Santa hats from DMC for my five grandkids, vowing I would knit all ten hats by this coming Christmas 2019 and recording the arrival of the kits in my post for 2/6/19. I completed the five Santa hats in July, in a race with my sister for her to read the five romance novels I sent her, before I finished the hats. I won and recorded the competition as well as the knitting details in my post for 7/15/19. I was on vacation in Nashville with some college friends last week and completed three of the five elf hats while there – simultaneously enjoying seeing the Washington Nationals win the World Series. I finished the final two elf hats yesterday after arriving back home to California. They make quite a cheerful work crew for Santa.

The middle three elf hats will be going to my two granddaughters and grandson living in Southern California, ages 5½, 3½, and 1½ respectively; the widest green edge (top left) will go to the oldest, the medium width green edge (top right) will go to the middle girl, and the narrowest green edge (bottom middle) to the youngest boy. This way they can tell them apart – in case it matters. They are all the same size. The other two hats at either end of the bottom row with all white ribbing or all green ribbing will go to my 4½-year-old grandson and 7-year old granddaughter in Oklahoma. For reference here are the five Santa hats completed several months ago in July. They too had designated recipients but have yet to be gifted.

Since my February post addressed the kits themselves and my July post detailed aspects of the knitting process, this post summarizes what I learned in case I ever... ever... make some more of these hats. They are fun and relatively easy but it will be a while. I need a break.

1. Use the pull skein of yarn from the inside out. Even if difficult to find the end buried within, it unfurls nicely once started and any inner "clump" that may pull out prematurely is quickly used up. I believe I used the Santa yarn from the outside and it rolled allover while I was knitting. I had to corral it in a bowl. The sequence of the yarn transition is consistent from ball to ball. It is solid, fuzzy, tri-color when used from central core, and the reverse, tri-color, fuzzy, solid when consumed from the exterior. For consistent multiple hats, draw from the inside or outside, but not interchangeably.
   
2. Since the bottom circumference in roughly ½ yard, I found using two yards + 8" (a tad more than multiplication by 4) is enough of a tail margin left behind when casting on.
   
3. I used five size 9 double pointed needles, casting on 72 stitches, 18 per needle, and putting each of my four markers after the 12th stitch on each needle.
   
4. Be careful with the fuzzy yarn (white for Elf, black for Santa). Since it is a bit thicker, stitches are more likely to drop off the end of the double pointed needles if not compressed inward toward the center portion of the needle. The solid color yard (green for Elf and red for Santa) and tricolored yarns (corded texture) are finer and more well behaved, not needing such close supervision. Keep a crochet hook handy for the occasional dropped stitch. That is why having 12 stitches on one side of the marker and six and the other is a good visual to alert if a stitch has fallen off the deep end, so to speak.
   
5. I went from using the counter on my cell phone as I did with the Santa hats to a low tech approach with a piece of paper and pencil to keep track of my rounds and decreases for the Elf hats. The lead pencil method shown has the tracking record for three hats with slants to the right, slants to the left, and circles denoting progress on each hat. It is quite chaotic but functional since I knew what my convention was. I was more tidy with the red pen version, creating the sheet while knitting the fourth hat, and marking it off for the fifth.

Since four hats are going to the four member family in Oklahoma (on the left) and six hats are going to the five member family in Southern California (on the right), even the mom and dad can get into the act. The kids can wear Santa hats while the parents wear Elf hats or vice versa. This configuration allows for spouse matching and sibling matching.

Optionally, the girls can be Santas while the boys are Elves or vice versa. This allows for mother/daughter and father/son matching.

Enough micromanaging! I hope the hats get worn, by the kids at least, in whatever configuration. I plan to update this post or write another, once I have some photos showing the hats being worn. I enjoyed knitting these, and frankly, I am proud that I managed to complete all ten before the holiday season is in full swing.