Project Advent Calendar: Mission Completed

So as mentioned in a previous post, I decided to make an advent calendar after seeing this one. After all, I'm in the middle of the holiday season rush with many orders to complete, so it made perfect sense to start something like this. (Yeah, I'm real smart aren't I?)

I'm the kind of person who reads a recipe for baking, goes "oooh, that sounds good, I have to make that" and then exchanges pretty much every ingredient for something else. It comes as no surprise then, that my version turned out a bit... different.

We (I recruited Mr Morrgan as my assistant) had a lot of fun, but completing Project Advent Calendar wasn't all that easy. After solving the first problem, finding empty matchboxes, we were faced with another dilemma - matchboxes are really too tiny for most of the yummy chocolates and toffees we wanted as "surprises". In the end we had to settle for pieces of nougat and toffee we could squish into the right shape. Mmm, squished toffee.

Francis and Freddy Raven approve of this project.

Then came the construction. Mr Morrgan and I, both fans of more unusual shapes, had an exchange that went something like this:

Mr Morrgan: "You know, it'd be cool if we could make this in the shape of an Aztec temple."
Me: "Haha, silly!"
Both: *laughter*

A few moments later:
Me: "Hmmmmmmm..."
Mr Morrgan: "Actually..."

Unfortunately, an Aztec temple proved too tricky a shape to create with only 24 matchboxes. Perhaps next year we will be equipped for more challenging projects. Instead, we decided on the spiral tower you see above. I taped the paper onto the boxes and boxes onto each other, while Mr Morrgan lined them with foil and wrote numbers on them. However, when the time came to fill our lovely tower with goodies, we came to realise two things:

1) Toffees and nougat pieces are rather heavy.
2) Spiral towers made of paper, tape and tiny cardboard boxes don't have much in the way of structural integrity.

This thing was already leaning dangerously to one side when empty, nearly toppling under its own weight. Filling it with candies was out of the question. Oh no, what to do? Well, after a brief moment of despair I found the perfect solution: bottle corks! Covered with paper and cut into suitable pieces they made excellent supports. Problem solved! And thus our creation was finished.

Time spent on project: A few hours.
Cost: More than I expected, even with partly recycled materials. So much for saving money making your own.
Difficulty: Pretty high for a knitter.
Fun level: High!
Injuries: Minor