Christmas came and went all too quickly so I am happy I started looking for a Christmas present project fairly early. I found these sweet nativity scenes on Pinterest and it turns out that the year of the house remodel was the perfect year for this project. I have an aversion to vacuuming carpeted stairs and convinced Craig to replace the carpet on the stairs with hardwood at the same time we replaced the upstairs carpet. The scraps of maple left over from the stair project were perfect and I just had to purchase heads from Joanne's. And chalk paint, which I have always wanted to try out.
I love the distressed look and read up on how to achieve it with chalk paint. Several articles suggested Vaseline and I tried that approach first. This technique is a bit messy and difficult to control the results, though I think it would work better on larger projects. Since we have a (seemingly) endless supply of every grade of sandpaper imaginable (or so it seems to me), I just painted the pieces then used a very fine finishing sandpaper to achieve the amount of distressing I wanted. I got carried away a few times and had to repaint a couple of pieces, but got the hang of it pretty quick.
I had sage green burlap on hand, left over from office Halloween decorations, which worked well for Mary's shawl. I love it when craft supplies have multiple uses!
