Advent Calendar

Made with Print Shop & Print Artist. First you go in choose poster. Pick out a background for your page. This way you can place the pictures very carefully on the background; for instance, if you decide to do a Christmas tree and want the ornaments to be the days of advent, you can make sure they are put on correctly.

Place small pictures onto the background. Do not place any too close to the edge of the page as it will make it harder for you to glue the 2 pages together! If you can’t find enough of the type of graphics you are looking for, cruise the web – you never know what goodies you can find!

When you have them arranged as you want them, remove the background, print it, save it (I used adventB for my saved name). Bring the background back and place boxes with numbers over each picture. Make sure the frame of the box’s number stand out from the background. Do not use filled boxes for this! As you place each box on, move it slightly to one side so that you can click on the picture beneath it to delete it.

Print Artist users have a definite edge here since this program will give you the exact location of each graphic, your boxes will always match up. Otherwise your printer will print the background, then the graphic, then the box – could be a mess and waste a LOT of ink. Position the box back place. Do this until you have covered all of the days.

Now, print and save this page (I called it adventA). You may want to glue the back page to a piece of thin cardboard like that found in shirt packages to make it sturdy.

Take an Exact-o knife, box cutter, or whatever you have that is sharp. Carefully cut around 3 sides of each number to create a door. If some of the doors opened up when you were cutting, use the temporary glue sticks that you find in office supply stores. All that is left to do is to take a glue stick, carefully glue the front to the back.

Note: I save the pages for 2 reasons: 1. In case I make a mistake cutting, I can print another one out. 2. I have a template to use over and over again each year. I just have to make minor adjustments such as changing some graphics backgrounds.

Submitted by Michele Tanis