How many days?

Hi everyone! 

How many days until Christmas day?

 

 People usually keep count via the traditional advent calendar. Opening a window to reveal a picture or a piece of chocolate. We go a bit over the top in our house... 

We have the advent calendars for the kids with the daily chocolate gift...you would think that would be enough wouldn't you?

We also have an advent house that we have had for so many years - It plays Christmas music, the Santa turns around....

and the house lights up!

The kids love it and won't let us not have it...even though the pictures have long since stopped being a surprise!

We also have a family tradition of advent gifts each year...and somehow we always manage to leave it until last minute causing a huge panic...(Note to self )- buy the gifts by October and wrap them in November next year!

And this year I decided it wasn't enough countdowns...we needed to add to it all....

And yes, it is (as of this moment) 20 days (and 14 hours) until Christmas day...

I decided to make this after having a shed built a few months ago - there were some blocks of wood left over...and I didn't like the idea of throwing them all away...

So I painted the block with Decoart Gesso. Then I stenciled some snowflakes with texture paste all over the block of wood

I used Decoart Americana Frost Gloss Enamel as dots and swirls

Buttons were stuck underneath the block 

When the texture paste was dry I covered the block of wood with DecoArt Media Fluid Acrylics in Titan Buff. This was followed with Raw Umber Antiquing cream applied all over and left to dry. I then wiped it with a damp cloth, being careful to not wipe too much Antiquing cream away.

The calendar was finished with Decoart Ultra-Matte varnish

I added a chalkboard using balsa wood and chalkboard paint. 

I made a little tray for the chalk by cutting a piece of soft balsa wood and wrapping sandpaper around a pencil and using that to sand away the wood.

I wrote the words 'Days until Christmas' with an italic embossing ink pen and sprinkled it with gold embossing powder. 

The gold embossing was a bit too bright and dazzling - so I just rubbed it with a pencil eraser and it toned it down perfectly without losing any of the metallic embossed effect.

A little wipe of White Fire Treasure Gold with a soft brush was used to just highlight the texture snowflakes and add a delicate glimmer.

Hope you like the additional countdown calendar!

Happy Crafting!
Laura
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