Advent Glass Block Decoration

I admit it--I'm on a mission to decorate my home for Advent this year!  Usually, my only Advent decorations are our purple table cloth, a rather plain ring that serves as our Advent wreath, our Nativity set and a few statues or figurines depicting St. Nicholas and St. Lucia.  I've felt the need to add more liturgical purple to our home.

So, after I made the Immaculate Conception glass block decoration described here,
I wondered how I could use the second glass block and the purple and pink mini lights to create a decoration for Advent.  So I went back to the internet, searching for some sort of Advent picture--perhaps an Advent candle? Maybe symbols from the Jesse tree?  No, nothing seemed quite right, until I found a silhouette image depicting Joseph and Mary's trip to Bethlehem.  The phrase "waiting in joyful hope" immediately popped into my head.  I copied the image into my desktop publishing program and played a bit with the text until I came up with an image that seemed to represent Advent to me.  I then printed two copies of the image and attached it to the glass block using Mod Podge, like I did for the Immaculate Conception glass block project. (You can see a quick photo tutorial here.)

After the Mod Podge dried, I threaded a string of purple lights and a string of pink lights through the pre-drilled opening in the glass block.  Since each string has its own "on" button, I'll turn on the purple lights on the first, second and fourth weeks of Advent, then turn on the pink lights for the third week of Advent.
 
Here are a couple of photos of the finished product. Unfortunately, my camera can't really capture the true purple color. But it will give you an idea of what the decoration looks like:

The "Waiting in Joyful Hope" image I created on my computer

Illuminated by the pink mini lights (unfortunately, the purple lights were too dark to photograph, although not too dark to illuminate the image.)

It really was a quick project; waiting for the Mod Podge to dry was the most time consuming part!


I still have one more set of pink and purple mini lights left.  Now I'm waiting for some heavenly inspiration on how to use them, perhaps incorporating the O Antiphons!


I'm participating in Skip to My Lou's "Made by You Mondays" blog hop.  There are tons of wonderful ideas over there; check it out if you have a moment: