I have seen so many advent calendars lately – I’ll share links to them at the end of this post. But I stumbled across the one above on ikat bag (you may remember she made this amazing princess pavilion and more recently, she made this unbelievably cute little blue playhouse). I decided that the girls and I could have fun making these trees together. Here are ours:

The trees are each made from a quarter of a dinner plat- sized circle, plus a little seam allowance where you glue it together. Here’s the pic from ikat bag of what your trees should look like:

Sometimes I am a little slow to figure things out, so it took a few tries at a template before I got it right. Here are the steps I took:
1). Trace a dinner plate on a piece of paper.
2). Draw a vertical line down the middle of the circle, then draw another line about a quarter inch over for the seam allowance.
3). Cut out the semi-circle by cutting on the line of the seam allowance – see the pencil markings below (the blue paper is just for contrast).

4). Use the semi-circle pattern to trace 11 more semi-circles (12 semi-circles = 24 quadrants/24 trees)
5). Measure and draw a horizontal line across the middle of the semi-circles, to make two quadrants. Each quadrant is a tree. Cut all of your semi-circles into quadrants.

6). And finally, you’ll want to snip a piece of the seam allowance where the top of the cone forms, like in the picture above, so that the tree comes to a nice point.

I hope those directions aren’t too confusing.

I did all of the cutting ahead of time, so that I could let the girls jump right in with the fun part: decorating the trees with stickers, glitter, sequins and stamps. When they were done decorating, I glued each of the trees together.

Instead of making 24 trees, we made 21 trees and then added 3 small presents to the landscape.

I splurged this weekend on some Martha Stewart glitter from Michael’s. In hindsight, I wish we’d used white paper for the trees and made all of them glitter trees, because the colors are awesome. Next year.

I thought about hanging tags from the top of the tree with numbers on them, but I think I’m just going to play this by ear – let them choose a tree or present every night, without having to go in any order.

Now I just have to go out and find some treasures to hide under these trees!

As promised at the start of this post, here are some of my favorite advent calendars I’ve seen lately:

Adorable advent calendar by Pickle (via @zakkalife)

Advent calendar by Jodii

An amazing handmade advent calendar by Gingerbread Snowflakes.

Also, you can see a great advent calendar round up by Design Crush, and another by Oh So Beautiful Paper.