Minecraft LEGO Advent Calendar

The past few years I have purchased the LEGO City Advent Calendar, which is great fun for kids. Since I only have two kids, they would alternate days opening the calendar. This year we have a tighter budget, so I decided I would make my own Christmas countdown calendar this year - A LEGO Minecraft Advent calender!

 

My kids (and probably yours, too!) are obsessed with Minecraft. There is evidence of this all over the house, including on display in the living room:

I figured the least I could do was donate two muffin tins, some LEGOs, and a few hours to create a homemade Minecraft Advent calendar! First, I cut out 3 inch squares out of card stock. Then, I punched circles with the leftover card stock, wrote the numbers on the circles, and glued them on to the squares.

The bulk of time came in designing the LEGO Minecraft miniatures that would fit (in pieces) into the muffin holes. Since my kids are obsessed with the swords and pickaxes, I am going to fill up most of the holes with various combinations (both ones you can build in Minecraft and others that you can't).

For the sword (from top to bottom), I used 4 1x1 bricks, a 1x2 plate with 1 stud, a 1x4 plate, and 2 1x1 cylinders.
For the pickaxe (from top to bottom), I used a 1x2 tile, a 1x4 plate, 2 1x2 plates, and 3 1x1 cylinders.
 
Here are a few of the 20-something swords and pickaxes I put together, along with a furnace my husband made:

That pickaxe on the right has an obsidian handle (black LEGOs) and redstone (red LEGOs) for the axe part. Other colors to use: blue for diamond, yellow for gold, brown for oak, tan for birch, gray for stone/iron. With all the color combinations, you could easily fill your calendar with only swords and pickaxes! It is fun to include some other items, such as the furnace, or blocks (just throw in a bunch of green/brown or gray/black pieces), or a creeper face (shown at the top). I have been photographing each miniature LEGO piece and am going to print them out tomorrow to glue to the back of each red or green card stock square. I will then take apart each LEGO creation and place it into a muffin tin hole, and either hot glue or tape the squares to the muffin tins. Here are some of the blocks I've included:

Clockwise from top left: gold, redstone, bedrock, diamond.

Feel free to include traditional Christmas items as well, such as a Christmas tree, a sleigh, presents, a wreath, etc. Here are a few presents:

You can get tons of ideas by looking at the contents of previous years' calendars:

The beauty of this project is that you can use what you have on hand. If you don't have a lot of LEGOs, but have a color printer, search for "printable minecraft block" in Google image search and instead make a Minecraft papercraft calendar! If you do this project, I'd love to see the pieces you've created - feel free to link up your own blog posts in the comments below.

mini felt christmas tree ornaments - lazy style

A friend was telling me how much her kids were enjoying their felt Christmas tree and I thought, "I should make one of those!" but I didn't have any giant pieces of green felt and wasn't in the mood for a large sky blue or pale gray tree (those are the only large pieces of felt in my stash). I *did* have small pieces of green felt, so I immediately thought "ornaments!"

We make ornaments every year (link takes you to ornaments we've done in the last few years). We have made a few others, but these were just too cute not to share:

What you need:

• Felt (cut to resemble something tree-like)
• Buttons or other "ornament" decorations
• Velcro sticky-back dots (or glue, but I pity the fool who gives a young child felt + glue)
• Ornament hooks

When dealing with felt, I always grab Velcro sticky-back dots. I love these things. I can't tell you how many times they've come in handy for something (to secure markers to Nature Bingo, to make a functional open/close door on a cardboard box play oven, to make a target practice game, etc.). Use the rough sticky dot, not the soft one. It clings to the felt.

Yeah. LOVE them.

Stick the Velcro on the back of some buttons. I had to cut the Velcro for the small buttons.

Stick, stick, stick. Don't like how it looks? Move your buttons around. Easy peasy!

My kids loved this! I even found some stars they could stick on, too. After they were done, I poked an ornament hook through the top. The end! I know they will love to do this over and over. They asked to make more so I need to find more green felt! This is by far the most mess-free, easy-to-prep, easy-to-clean up ornament we have done. =)

Create Homemade Tree Blocks - Natural STEM Toy

Make your own DIY Tree Blocks 

Spring is a great time to make tree blocks. The bark is easy to get off of the branches in spring, and since this is the most time consuming part otherwise, it really makes sense to pencil this into your sprint calendar. If you have any trees that need trimming or can get a few branches off your local freecycle/craigslist/Facebook group, and you don't mind putting in some time and effort, you will end up with a beautiful set of tree blocks your children can play with for many years, and maybe even pass on to their own children!

We had an abundance of ash trees on our property, which were too crowded and not very happy. They worked well for this project, and we get much more enjoyment out of them as blocks than we did when they were trees.

Get started making your own tree blocks

• tree branches
• a saw
• an oven or a warm spot in the sun
• a putty knife or box cutter
• ample time and patience

Select your branches. I chose a mixture of thin and thick. You will want to cut them to various lengths, but I tried to cut several the same length so they would work well for building structures. You will probably want to keep them as flat as possible, too, so that if you are building towers they aren't topsy turvy. I used a miter saw, but you can use whatever you have and are comfortable with.

Before de-barking the tree blocks

After you cut them you will want them to dry out a bit; this should help get the bark off. I sun dried mine but you can put them in the oven on the lowest setting for a few hours instead. If you are really lucky, you might get a branch where the bark just falls right off. One of our maple trees just lost a branch and I thought it would be nice to make some more tree blocks to add to our ash ones. The whole bark-removing step, which was the most time consuming of our ash tree blocks last year, took me all of 2 minutes to de-bark an 8 foot long branch. It probably took me about 2 minutes per block last spring to de-bark the ash tree blocks. The other option is to leave the bark on, for a more natural look, and then all you need to do is cut them and sand the exposed surfaces!

drying in the sun

A year later, they still look great!

These blocks have so many uses and if you can find the wood for free and have the tools (or can borrow them), this is such an inexpensive project. Sets like this you can buy can run $40! Eek! To de-bark, I cut into the bark with a blade and then peeled it back with a putty knife or my fingernails. It was fairly time consuming, but I'm really happy with the result. After all of the bark was removed, I sanded all of the block first with coarse sandpaper, and then with fine sandpaper.

Why I think you'll LOVE these 

Not only are these blocks fun to play with, they are a wonderful natural building toy! The smooth wood and weight of them is really amazingly satisfying. Please note that because they are solid wood, they can be quite heavy, so take care with little toes and fingers.