When I was a child my Dad made us this beautiful advent calendar out of card in the shape of a house with Christmas card scenes behind each door. I think it was this and a life as a church going Christian reconciling commercial 25 day advent calendars and the religious festival of advent - 4 Sundays leading up to Christmas that started this project's journey. That and I wanted to make something for my latest nephew, something that could be used easily and had real purpose, so I hit on the advent calendar idea.
As with all my projects, it seems huge but it's broken down into modular sections, each of which are an achievable size in a short time frame.
Of course making things small scale has its own problems, and can make stitching quite difficult, or designs simplified from the original plan.
Early on there were a few core things I wanted to do overall.
- Have as many of the Christmas story elements in there as I could
- I wanted the whole thing to feel a bit like a tree of Jesse (family tree of Jesus)
- There to be this idea of a path going along - the journey of Jesus' parents to Bethlehem.
I also found early on in design that I rapidly got tired of so many beards and so many men. I made a conscious choice to include more women, and, to look into interesting biblical women, who were not just mothers, and perhaps, some slightly obscure and less well known figures.
Unlike some of my other projects I've blogged about this is a retrospective series of posts, and so I'm not quite sure what I will remember or what I might choose to say about any or all of it.
I will probably update this post afterwards with links to different sections, or I may add an index post. I'll see how I go.
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