Because I Can Never Leave Well Enough Alone

I'm very pleased with my Advent Calendar, but like secular calendars it has only 24 squares, corresponding to the days of December before Christmas.  I'm trying to teach the liturgical calendar to the kids, however, and that means celebrating the actual Advent season, which this year starts today.  I'd been meaning to make extra squares for those years Advent starts in November, and this year seemed the perfect time to start, since I'd only need to make one.

But what design?  I pretty much exhausted my repertoire of secular and religious Christmas symbols  I like.  A little bit of research, however, reminded me that December 12 is the feast day of La Virgen de Guadalupe, a big deal both for Latinos and Americans in general.  Perfect!

Because I am not nearly skilled enough to replicate the image in thread or pencil, the original plan was to sew a prayer card onto the felt square, but although I have a gazillion prayer cards stuffed into a cigar box, La Virgen wasn't one of them.  Then I remembered I had actual fabric printed with her image, which was even better.  I snipped out her likeness and attached it to the felt using gold thread and straight stitches to mimic the rays around her.  A few ribbon roses finished it off.

I wanted her on the twelfth day -- of December, not Advent, so the twelfth square on the main calendar section, and this sounds ridiculously complicated just typing it -- so I removed the square in that slot (a poinsettia) and sewed it on.  The poinsettia moved to the first slot, because the original square there, an Advent wreath, I want to always be first.  That I moved to a new panel designed to hold the extra "November squares":

Makes sense?  Of course, I now have an issue when Advent starts December 1, 2, or 3 -- the main calendar will suffice, but it won't have the Advent wreath square.  I'll deal with that in 2017.