2024 Digital Advent Calendar

This year, to celebrate the holiday season, I’ve decided to do a virtual Advent calendar. Each day, I’ll update this blog post with a new treat under that date’s heading. You can expect to find free patterns, printables, playlists, recipes, links to favorite poems, and more.

For daily emails letting you know when the next update is posted, please sign up for the dedicated Advent calendar section of my newsletter.

And as you may know, I care a lot about making sure my neighbors are fed. That’s why I donate a portion of each month’s profits from my business to my local chapter of Feeding America. My blog is a big portion of that income each month, and December is usually a particularly good month for ad revenue. As a result, I’m committing to donating 10% of my blog’s ad revenue for the month of December on top of the existing monthly donation I already make.

Your visits to this post and all the other posts on my blog help combat food insecurity in my community. Thank you! 

December 1, 2024

Today is the first day of the 2024 virtual Advent calendar, so let’s start off with a bang! I’m giving you a free pattern that, up until now, has always been a paid pattern. This pattern is a chunky-weight hat that’s perfect for last-minute gift knitting (I can whip one up in just a few hours).

Without further ado, here you are: the Pebbles by the Sea Hat is now free for everyone to use. Happy December 1!

December 2, 2024

For today’s update, I come bearing a festive printable. Much of the traditional holiday imagery doesn’t really resonate with me because I grew up (and still live) in Southern California. I only ever heard sleigh bells in movies. Snowflakes? They were something we had to intentionally drive to see. The only cardinal I saw until my 20s was the faux bird on my mom’s front door wreath.

But we do have plenty of pine trees and pine cones and red berries everywhere, and those sure do put me in a cheerful, wintry mood. Today’s treat for you, then, is a knitting needle conversion chart decorated with lots of festive faux greenery. There are pine boughs and pine cones and sprigs of happy berries. You can print it out in a small scale to tuck into your project bags or print the original size to tape into a project journal or clip into a binder.

Happy stitching, friends.

December 3, 2024

Wintertime can be kind of gloomy for a lot of us, and sometimes that makes it difficult to start our day. For today’s Advent calendar treat, I’m sharing my Good Mornings playlist, which has helped me get my butt in gear for over a decade now. There are lots of old favorites from my late teens and 20s on here, and each of them has some element that helps me snap out of my inertia.

I hope this playlist does the same for you, too! You can listen right here on this page or, if you have a Spotify account, you should be able to save it to your favorite playlists over there, too.

December 4, 2024

A nice thing about baking in wintertime is that the oven helps keep the house toasty warm, and then you also have a toasty warm treat at the end. I don’t like my treats overly sweet, though, so most cakes and cookies are just too much.

Which is why, for today’s Advent calendar update, I’m bringing you my favorite scone recipe. I’ve been using this recipe since 2010, and it is wonderfully easy. Unlike a lot of scone recipes, it doesn’t call for things I rarely have on hand (like sour cream or even regular cream). It’s just flour, sugar, milk, butter, baking powder, and salt, and I usually have all of those things in the house.

Give this recipe a try and let me know how it goes!