Good morning, crafty friends! Are you having as much fun as I am this week here on the Blog featuring Advent Calendars from our terrific Creative Team? I have a gorgeous specimen to share with you today, this time from designer Gayatri Murali. If you love all things shiny and luxurious, you will love Gayatri’s advent calendar. Check it out…

Notes from Gayatri on her project…

Here is my thought process for making my advent calendar boxes. It seems to me that luxe decor  and mixing metals is very trendy in interior decorating at the moment.  And an advent calendar is something you can certainly display as part of your Christmas decor. So why not do a luxe advent calendar? My color combination is gold, silver, white with pop of blush and mint. If you want to personalize a version of my advent calendar, keep the gold, silver and white but change the pop of colors according to your liking. Red and green will give you a great mix of luxe and traditional. I went for a variation on that with blush and mint because it suits my decor in my home.

I used TE’s gold and silver foil cardstocks to die cut the frame of the Matchbox and Sugar Cube cardstock for the sliding box. Then I gold and silver heat embossed a few Matchy Backgrounds – Holiday backdrops. I trimmed them all so they layer on the matchbox leaving half a centimeter of the gold and silver showing around them. I adhered the gold backgrounds on the silver matchboxes and silver backgrounds on the gold boxes. I used some gold and silver twine to wrap around the matchboxes and tie into a bow.

Finally, I stamped the numbers from Candy Cane Numbers stamp using Pink Champagne and Mint Julep Matched Inks and die-cut them using the coordinating dies. The Candy Cane numbers are adhered on top of the matchboxes using foam adhesives. I used Pink Champagne dye ink for even numbers and Mint Julep dye ink for odd numbers. You can fill the inside of the boxes with whatever you want. If can be gifts or vouchers or bible verses or Christmas messages. Add a bit of glitter or sequins inside for even more glitz!

To display them, I put some of the boxes into an apothecary jar I already had in my decor stash and spilled some around it for a nice relaxed feel. I thought it would be fun for my family to hunt through them for the next day. Thanks for stopping by!

Are you feeling glamorous right about now? I love how elegant this advent calendar is and the un-traditional way of displaying it. Are you ready to make your own advent calendar now? For more inspiration, check out this week’s TE Newsletter!