Cool awesome Disney Countdown courtesy of Love our Disney

Thank you so much Melissa for letting me come and share this tutorial with your readers!

When you are heading to Disney, it is fun to have something to get the kids (or yourself) excited for the trip that last week.

The inspiration for this piece came from this book. (Page 12). They had a countdown, but there are no instructions, and the embelishments are all different, and look more complicated in my opinion. I decided I needed to do a tutorial.

Supplies you NEED:

• Disney paper- 12x12
• Colored card stock 12x6
• Solid color card stock 12x12
• 8 "tags" that are approximately 2" wide and 3.5-4" tall (or you can make your own)
• Stickers and embellishments
• Adhesive
• Scissors/paper cutter
• Ribbon
• Vellum

Extras I used

• Sticker maker
• Printer
• Hot glue gun
• 12x12 card board
• Distressing ink

To start- if you are going to print anything on vellum in the printer- you may want to do this first (preferably 24 hours in advance) as ink on vellum takes a long time to dry.

Next- prepare your tags. I used one from the countdown in my scrapbook to trace and make my own out of white card stock. You need 8 tags total, but it is good to have some back ups just in case.

If you know me, you know I love to use distressing ink. I purposely over did it on the cards here. I think it gives a better effect then plain white. I punched holes in them knowing I wanted to embelish them later.

After I distress the tags, I put them aside to dry a little. I begin working on the main part of the countdown.

Take your vellum and cut 2 strips that are approximately 2.5" by 11"
Using a tag to figure out placement, glue the vellum on to the Disney paper, glue only the 2 short edges and the bottom. Your tags will need to be able to slide/sit in the vellum. You are basically making a pocket.

Then place, use a tag in the top row of vellum to figure out a good place to cut the Disney paper (or you can use the whole thing and cover the top part up, but I hate to waste that paper). After you have trimmed the Disney paper, glue this to the white card stock. It should look like the picture above.

Now you will add some ribbon embelishment to the vellum. Make sure to use a tag to measure in between. I put the bottom one on first, and then the sides. Last, I do the middle ones. If possible, and it won't make the tags fit too tight, I put a dot of glue under the vellum where the ribbon is to separate the pockets for each tag.

I now usually take a break from the main page and go to the tags. I printed out little sayings for all the days on my printer (I used the Disney font) on regular paper (you can use cardstock too). To make it easy to apply them to the tags, I cut them out and ran them through my sticker maker.

Then I added number stickers to the top and I also printed a big Disney "D" and made a sticker of it.

This is what you should have so far.

At this point, if you don't have holes in your tags, you can skip this next step. I like to embellish the tags so I put ribbons in them and tie them.

Next is another optional step. I wanted my friend to be able to hang the countdown on the wall. So, I took a 12x12 piece of cardboard. I punched 4 holes in it. One at each side about 2" in from the side, then two in the center. Then I ran ribbon through it (and hot glued the ribbon down on the other side so it couldn't move around.

After that, I glued the 12x12 page to the other side (not pictured) of the cardboard. Then I took some colored cardstock and glued it to the top. (I used hot glue for all of this). Then I distressed around the sides.

Here, you can either use stickers as I did in the picture of the one in my 2007 countdown pictured at the top of this page, or, this time, I used the Disney font and printed it on Vellum that could be ran through the sticker maker (so this is a smaller title because I only have a small sticker maker). Make sure, as I noted above, you have pre-printed your vellum and it is completely dry. I used a hair dryer to ensure mine was completely dry.

This is what you should have so far. (Tags are out of the pockets)
Now is the fun part. Embellish each pocket. Many of the days rhymes mention characters. In that case, I try and put the character on the pocket. I used chip board characters, stickers, and other random embellishments. I mixed and matched, used different textures, etc to make it fun. You could add buttons across the top of a few (as done in the book this craft idea came from). Whatever. Just have fun with it.

Then, what you end up with is something like this.

It's a great way to get kids excited for the upcoming trip, and also a great first page to a scrapbook for your vacation.

I am also happy to have this giveaway for Melissa's readers, and reader's of the other bloggers participating in the Blog Your Way to Disney event. Enter the giveaway below for a chance to win one of two amazing prizes!

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