Today I’ve been a crafty hound and helped Mum to make our advent calendar for this years countdown to Christmas! She’s been collecting toilet rolls at home and from work for the last month and boy, do they go through a lot of toilet paper! Its a good job she didn’t ask me to save any as I tend to just use a leaf.

It’s such a good advent calendar for us dogs as it means Mum can monitor the doggy treats that are going into it and I can help out and lick a few of those treats = win win!

So here’s how we did it…

We started with: brown paper, cardboard, 24 toilet rolls (thats a lot of wiping), glue and dog treats (1 per pooch per day)

However it doesn’t help when you have a puppy trying to ‘help’ you by stealing and eating the toilet rolls Mum has collected, to say she wasn’t amused is an understatement, she’d been in the depths of the work bin for those!

Dad printed us some numbers 1-24 for every day of the advent countdown which Mum then stuck on the end of each toilet roll. Glue is involved in this so I suggest you get your Mum to help you like I did if you too have a beard, no one wants their beard stuck to their nose. Just saying…

But waiting for the gue to dry is pretty tedious, I had to refrain from eating the treats however sniffing was allowed. From a distance.

We then had to trim the excess paper off the toilet rolls, again ask your Mum to do this as you may end up giving yourself an impromptu haircut.

Then it was the fun part, stuffing the toilet rolls with the treats! Each day has 2 treats in, according to Mum this is 1 for Alan and 1 for me, not none for Alan and 2 for me, I think my idea was better…

I supervised the allocation of what treats go in which day as I like to mix it up a bit. We also stuffed it with a bit of tissue after the treat was put in to make sure the treats didn’t fall out, that was the best part of the making process, racing Mum to snatch the treat that ran away…

Then put some glue around the edge and quickly place it on the cardboard backing and push down to secure, Mum said I was too ‘heavy pawed’ to do this.

Once you get into a rhythm it’s quite easy however it doesn’t help when the pup tries to steal the toilet rolls. Again.

But Alan was pretty bored by the whole thing, arts and crafts isn’t his ‘thing’

After all 24 were stuck down the roof went on (my builder Grandad will be proud of the house I’ve built) and the advent calendar was ready, I can’t wait to start it tomorrow!

Dach’s all for now – better get crafty!

Jeffrey x