I’ve made lots of progress on this custom order Christmas Advent Calendar.  The brick colored paint was a perfect pick for the paper that I’m about to start applying.  As usual, I got so caught up in the crafting I neglected to take pictures, but I’ll attempt to fill in the blanks here as best I can.  So, last installment I was adding the brick paper to the pieces of wood that we’re going on the interior sides of the advent structure before the entire piece was assembled and glued.  That’s been done and the unit has been assembled (see earlier segment for the “how to”).

Doesn’t the brick paper look great in there?  You can barely see it in this shot but there’s brick on the sides of the hearth area and it’s also on the (in)sides of the little cupboards that have the doors that are open, above.

Now you can see the whole interior of the hearth – love how this turned out.  And wait until you see what I have planned to put in this big hearth area!  But first – more paper.

I see the upper area of this piece as a large “chimney” so I decided to brick it all around.  This brick paper has the feature of looking like it’s been used/heated so I took advantage of that fact and cut and arranged my paper so the darkened areas align with each other appropriately.

This is coming together very nicely.  Now for the bottom paper.

It’s time to bring in the Christmas theme – and holly on a brick red background is perfect.

These colors are so warm and festive – I’m definitely getting into the Christmas groove here.

Now for the rest of the Holly paper.  Starting from the top down, I measured and cut my pieces but if you look close you’ll see that the front edges of the unit are rounded off and the back are square.  Trying to cut the same curve by hand is nearly impossible.  I discovered an easy way around this years ago – the corner punch.

They come in a variety of “sizes” , this one has a pretty short and tight curve to it which matches my wood curve fairly well.  Don’t forget to continue to darken the edges on all your paper pieces – it really makes a big difference in the end’s overall look.

Holly paper is ON!  Next up – the drawers and cupboard doors.

Craft On People.