Wood Block Christmas Countdown

I saw a cute idea on Cottage Paint's Instagram feed that I thought would be fun to make with the kids.  As I opened the door to our workshop to cut some blocks, I was happily surprised to find a set all ready for me!  Turns out, I had an extra set of blocks cut AND sanded from making wood block pumpkins a few weeks ago.  Guess this project was meant to be!

We started with some wood blocking, reclaimed wood, of course :)

Brent cut this star out with a jig saw - you have no idea how hard it was for us to draw a star.  I'm talking tricky enough that we had to google it.  Pathetic, huh?

 Emma helped me do all of the painting.

Here's our first coats of paint on the blocks.  We used base coats of regular latex paint and then brushed metallic acrylic paints over top of each one.

To do the wording - because free handing was not an option - trust me, I tried - I followed Her Tool Belt's instructions.  She used Photoshop to get her lettering but since I don't have that, good ol' Microsoft Word worked just fine for me!

 We covered each block of wood with a layer of painter's tape.

 And laid our wording on top.

Using an X-acto knife, I cut around each letter.  I thought this process was going to be pretty quick.  Spoiler, it took forever.  But I put on my headphones and listened to a few episodes of Serial - which is amazing if you haven't heard it - and the time passed rather quickly.

Then I put a few coats of acrylic paint in a contrasting color over the lettering.  Peel the tape off when dry.

 For the top block, where the number of days was going to go, I used this chalkboard paint.

 I taped off a section of the block for the chalkboard paint.

 2 coats later and once it had dried, you can pull the tape off.

 At first, I was planning to glue all of the blocks together but then decided not to.  It will be much easier to store after the holidays if it isn't such a large piece, plus, it's much easier for the kids the erase the top block and write the new number for the day if they can lay it down to do it.

 This was a fun project and the kids are having a blast changing the number each day!