My wife likes chocolate yet she never wants an advent calendar, so I decided to make her the ultimate chocolate advent calendar.

Materials

• 22 x standard bars of Cadbury’s dairy milk
• 1 x medium sized bar (her birthday is on the 4th of December)
• 1 x 1kg bar of dairy milk
• Tinsel
• 4′x2′ sheet of mdf
• Hot glue
• Sticky foam pads
• Sticky bows
• Silver spray paint
• Sticky Shiny Numbers 1-24

The MDF sheet was spray painted silver and tinsel hot glued around the edge for decoration. Each small had 2 sticky pads stuck to the back and a square of purple card with the appropiate number stuck to the front. The kilogram bar had several sheets of sticky pads and 2 sticks of hot glue to hold it on.

Construction time was about 3 hours (an awful lot of sticky pad peeling was involved) with an hour or so of that waiting for the paint to dry.

My Wife loved it (it was after all mostly chocolate) and has a few jealous friends who have to make do with the a standard advent calendar.

More photos on Flickr

As it’s Valentines day next week, it seems like a good time to post this project from 2008.

Partly inspired by Meredith Scheff’s travel journal this formed the casing for my ‘and finally’ present for my fiancée for Xmas 08.  Inside the book is a hollowed section, inside that a purple felt purse, inside that, a sparkly bracelet (the actual present).

The heart on the front is Fimo, formed with a cookie cutter with salt pushed in to the surface. When the salt dissolves, it leaves a pitted metal effect.

The compartment was cut about 10 days before Xmas day. I had to lock myself in the bedroom for a few hours to do it.

The book is one of two i’d bought from a charity shop, 50p each. I didn’t realise until later but both books are dedicated to people with the same surname as my fiancée, a nice bonus (but strange looks when she opened it).

The pouch was a last minute addition made from left over felt from a  Halloween project that never happened, the sewing is pretty rough, but did the job.

The final assembly of the book, inside covers and ribbons was completed the morning we left for Wales, requiring me to borrow her hair drier to speed things up a bit.

Using my little CNC machine I knocked up this little star to go on the top of our Christmas tree. It was cut from a piece of 2mm x 40mm aluminium stock using a 2 flute 1mm end mill. The pic above shows it still held in place in the stock by 2 small tabs I added to the outline toolpath.

Here’s the star popped out and given a bit of a polish.

Finally, it’s in place on the top of our tree.