This weekend I was pestered incessantly by the kids for chocolate advent calendars. This followed by requests to avoid Milka chocolate, cheap chocolate -well any chocolate that wasn’t frankly Cadbury’s or Lindt!

After a cursory browse of our local supermarkets I judged that my children were a little old for Superman and that Milka appeared to be the only competitor. It was time to get crafty!

First I cut a large triangle of card (for strength), covered it with an equal sized piece of wadding and overlaid with a piece of taupe linen in order to form a minimalist christmas tree. The colour of the linen is essentially immaterial but I used what I had lying about.

Now I took the easy route and bonded the wadding to the card and secured the linen in place by PVA glue, making sure to wrap neatly all the edges of linen about the back of the card. I then cut a small rectangular piece of foam and covered it with red fabric to form the christmas tree pot, and stitched it to the bottom of the triangular tree.

I then proceded to cover 25 buttons with red fabric. Specialist coverable buttons are available at any good habadashery store.

This was the end result:

The essential part of the proceedings as far as my children were concerned was the activity of firstly eating the chocolate and secondly, counting down to christmas. This I achieved by selecting a random set of very small decorations which i modified with some fine ribbon.

A found a large plastic bauble which opened into two parts, which would be the early morning carrier of chocolate and the daily decoration in our local craft shop, and gave it a button in the centre of the christmas tree ‘box’ to hang from.

The choosing of the chocolate was a very pleasant experience!

Et Voila: A little sample of the end result-

But for the end result you will have to wait for christmas – and I can guarentee there won’t be any chocolate left!

Sorry!