New year: time to wake up!

The Craft Barn challenges to make calendar pages all year long... I decided to play along, since these will make a lovely Christmas present for someone at the end of the year.  For January, the prompt words were aqua and snowflakes. Since this fits in with a couple of other challenges I've been keeping an eye on, I am also posting this for the SimonSaysStamp Monday challenge (Winter Stamping) and the Rubberdance January Challenge (Frosty blues). Since calendars in Finland usually run from Monday to Sunday, I drew my own grid at the bottom of the page and stamped the days on it.

I happen to have loads of old book pages that my parents found while renovating their attic, and I am personally challenging myself to combine them to the challenge prompts.The book these pages are from contains sermons, obviously for a whole year. Hence I chose the first sermon for the first Sunday of the year, and the topic is "Now is the time from your sleep to wake up" It's funny how language can change in about 150 years, the words are in a funny order, and the font is so difficult, no one is going to bother to read further than that!

I started of with a sheet of sturdy Canson Imagine. When the grid for the days had been done, I painted the background with watercolours. I forgot to fasten the paper and it curled quite strongly, that is why it is still fastened to cardstock with paper clips. Luckily it has 11 months to straighten out! After sewing the piece of old paper on the background. I used a couple of different stencils to add texture and and some floral stamps to build my image. I regret not stamping the tree much higher up. It would have looked better (it has a very low stem) and I could have built a hill for it with layers or crackle paste... now the banner with "January 2016" was used to fill the empty space. I used quite a bit of glimmery stuff (pearlescent acrylic paint, embossing powder and stickles) and some small white pearls to embellish the sheet. The edges have been covered with crackle texture paste, but that doesn't really show on the pics.