The Teacher's Pett: My Tesco calendar

So I tried, I really did, but in the end I couldn't resist and ended up buying two Tesco Advent calenders to alter. It's my first go at an altered project but I'm really pleased with it and glad I've done the first one. It was a bit of a learning curve and there are things I'll do/try differently next time.

This was the calender as I bought it. As you can see, the colours are a bit garish and not particularly Christmassy.

My first job was to repaint most of it. I used a dulux tester pot called 'Redcurrant glory' to redo the red and found this was a really good match so I only had to paint the Santa. A couple of coats and he was gone.

I then used a pale green to redo the roof and half of the drawers (I did the remaining drawers in red). I painted them inside and out even though the originals were only painted on the front.

I then used the patterned paper from my stash to recover the drawers by tracing around the drawers and cutting slightly inside the line. I used an emery board to distress the edges. Next time I might not leave a slight edge of paint and instead paper straight to the edges. I also found cutting around the finger holes quite difficult but someone suggested (after I'd done it!) that a 3/4" circle punch does a great job. If only I'd thought about that! I'd like to use a wider range of papers next time too but I was only working with what I had. I glued the papers on using a mix of 2/3 PVA to 1/3 water.

Anyway, I then found some cute puffy stickers in WHSmiths reduced to a bargain of £1.24 and they matched the papers perfectly with Christmas trees, snowflakes and snowmen. I added those to some of the drawers along with some glittery numbers (a mix of small and large sizes and positioned randomly on the drawers). I added some ric rac to the roof along with some pale green bling gems. I also painted a reindeer decoration that I picked up from Tesco (10 for £1) with gold acrylic paint and a splash of glitter and then stuck that to the chimney.