Disney Countdown Sign

We are going to Disney World Florida in October as a celebratory treat to mark the end of a year of operations for Joseph. We booked it shortly after we found out that our baby would have a cleft lip and palate while I was pregnant. The most difficult thing to come to terms with was the fact that my poor little baby would have to go through the pain of the operations. We knew feeding was going to be more difficult than it would be with a non-cleft baby and we just felt that we could do with something to look forward to after dealing with all the difficulties we would face.

I was lucky enough to visit twice as a child but my partner Simon has only ever been to EuroDisney. He is Disney crazy and always buying the boys DVDs and popping into the Disney store to buy them little treats. Needless to say he is VERY excited about the holiday. As I've said before he regularly rolls his eyes when I try to talk to him about my ideas or makes so I thought I would test him..... and I made him this countdown plaque:

I actually made two and gave him the choice of which to use. He said he wanted both! :o) so the small one has been made into a magnet and put on the fridge and the larger one is on the kids bedroom door. You can't see it in the picture but there us a stick of chalk attached to the string that holds the sign up.

The plaques were bought from the same seller on ebay - I negotiated the price for buying them in bulk and with the holes pre-drilled. They were painted using my Kobra spray paint. The Mickey Mouse head shape was bought from my trusty LaserSmith and painted with chalk paint bought from hobbycraft. They were glued on using Gorilla superglue and the writing and decorating was completed using my uni posca paint pens.

It took about 30 minutes to make both of them and that included paint drying time. Simples!!

Current work in progress...

I ordered some decorative mdf shapes and letters from Lasersmith which arrived super fast-often there's a 7-10 day dispatch time on wooden craft items, but these were dispatched the very next day. Whilst they don't offer a massive range of shapes, I have found their prices very reasonable for letters. 

Anyway, it was my intention to create a personalised gift for my niece and nephew for their new bedrooms in their dad's house. I planned to decorate a large letter with cute embellishments and then frame it in a shadow box. When I received the letters they were sent in the wood that they had been cut out from. My eyes instantly lit up as I realised I would be able to use this as a stencil.

I dug out a canvas board I'd bought from a stationary shop in Llandudno which only cost a couple of pounds. I wanted to make a girly one first as I already had lots of lovely embellishments to use. However in my eagerness to get cracking I was really haphazard and it ended up a bit of a dogs dinner. Rather than waste the canvas I just needed to respray it with a darker colour. So I decided to spray the canvas in a dark blue and stencil on the letter in a lighter blue. Again, it was a bit of a rush job and I had to touch it up in places where the colour had leaked but I was really pleased with how it turned out. 

Now I just need to wait for my embellishment to arrive to further decorate it. I'm considering putting the rest of the name in 3cm letters going across the bottom with either a whale or an elephant wooden shape. What do you think? Letters in blue and shape in white? Or all in light blue? Decisions, decisions!

Where the colour leaked I simply sprayed a household sponge with the spray paint and dabbed at it with the correct colour. Next time I do this I'll take the time to cover areas I don't want paint getting onto with masking tape and spray into the stencil from straight above rather than at an angle so the paint doesn't leak.