There’s lots of advent calendars on the market right now, and some are super fabulous, but also.. super expensive. The thing is, within each of them, there’s probably a few things you’d never use nor want. So enter – a bespoke advent calendar. Make it for a loved one and make their Christmas!

Two great things about this are that the 24 bags can be used year after year but also- the gifts inside can sit within your budget. If someone’s made this advent for you, you can always reuse the bags for anything you’d like – use as packing bags in your suitcase, the small ones are perfect for jewellery storage, a little makeup bag, a laundry bag and so on. What a perfect multi use present!

To make your William Morris advent calendar, you will need:

• 2.5m of Strawberry Thief Red fabric. You can of course use any fabric you’d like. There’s lots of other Morris designs within our licensed collection. We also think this would look fabulous with Brother Rabbit red or Mallow wine as they’re Christmas red tones. But, there’s lots of other colours to match your Christmas colour schemes!
• 2 packs of ribbon – around 9.14m reels. You can choose any Christmassy ribbon you like, we thought the cream with Christmas tree ribbon we chose went with the Strawberry Thief patter.
• Frey check
• 1 reel of wire edge ribbon
• Sewing kit
• Sewing machine
• 24 gifts – all wrapped in tissue/ wrapping paper

How to make the advent calendar:

• Let’s start with the bags themselves, we did three sizes. Start with a 2.5m length of fabric and from this, we cut 8 large bags. These were 56cm wide by 42cm high. We cut two across the width of the fabric. Save the waste down the side for the smaller bags.
• Next, for the medium size bags, cut these 8 – 38cm wide x 30cm high – we got 4 across the width of the fabric
• For the bows, there is excess fabric which measures- 14cm high x 146cm long
• Next let’s cut the 8 small bags-  35cm wide by 21cm high. These were cut from the remaining fabric

• Once all the pieces are cut, we next turn a 1cm hem at the top of all the bags.
• Cut the ribbon to tie – 24 pieces of 80cm each is what we did. Cut them to a point and then coat the ends with fray check so that they stay perfect and don’t fray, this ensures you can use it in years to come.
• Place your piece of fabric flat on the table and lay your ribbon on top – pattern upwards. Then fold your fabric pattern to pattern to make a pocket shape and then, making sure to catch in the ribbon so that you can hang the bag. Double hem along the bottom for structure.

• Repeat 23 times with all sizes of bags. We kept the same length of ribbon on each so that each could be attached to our stair banister. You can present them however you like – if you wanted to make them into a draw string pouch and keep them under the tree or just give the bag to the advent-opener every day. So use your imagination with this one!
• Each bag should now be hemmed and stitched along the bottom and also inside out, so now you need to go back and turn them all the right way round so the pattern is visible.

To finish –

• To finish the bags, we stuck adhesive felt numbers onto the bottom right of the bags so that it’s clear which day of the advent each bag is. You could alternatively safety pin little twine tags onto each bag if you prefer that idea – our little numbers were from Hobbycraft.
• Wrap each present in tissue paper or wrapping paper and then pop them inside each bag so there’s a present in each. Our advent this year was for a couple so we did one person’s gifts in red and one in silver tissue paper. Just remember to let them know which colour each of them are!
• To finish, simply dress the bannister or area you’re putting your advent calendar on – we used an M&S Christmas garland that has berries and lights and pine cones on it which really finishes it all off. We then added a couple of packets of battery operated lights to really finish the entire project off!

There you have it – your very own William Morris advent calendar!

We absolutely love this craft and were so excited to bring it back for another year! The 24 gifts being whatever you like, can be so personalised which is what we love. From chocolates to gifts you know they’d want, you can gift anything. You could even do a 25th gift with their Christmas present in there too.

If you make an advent calendar of your own, we would absolutely love to see it! Please send us photos to our email: [email protected] or tag us on social media!

By sending us photos to our email, we’ll send you a discount code in return. That’ll give you 20% off your next order on our website.

Here’s a little close up to show the bags and ribbons and how we wrapped the two peoples gifts to be coordinated for them. It’s nice to be able to get two gifts into one advent.