Order and Chaos

A while ago, I cleared out my craft room.  Literally.  I took everything out of the room ... then tried to get it all back in!  I gave or threw away a lot of stuff.  I found all sorts of things I had forgotten about, including a large number of wooden items I had bought to "do something with".  These wooden tea light blocks came, I think from the Craft Barn and are made by Artemio.

I primed them, then painted them gold.  Then I applied Paperartsy crackle glaze, left to dry and over-painted with a burgundy acrylic paint.  They stayed like that for a while, I knew I wanted to use texture paste, but didn't have it quite straight in my head as to how I wanted to proceed.  Then I bought the random circles mask and realised that I could use it on one block, with the gridded squares mask on the other block.  And so Order and Chaos came to be ......
I used some Treasure Gold through the stencils once the texture paste had dried, then when that had cured for 24 hours, I used a matt varnish over the whole block - Americana Duraclear Matte varnish, again from the Craft Barn.  It is the best varnish I have found so far for a really matte finish, but it does need to be stirred thoroughly so that all the matting agents are well mixed rather than sunk to the bottom of the container!
I put some green sticky-back felt/baize on the base and they were done.  They are a little more burgundy than they appear in the photo, not quite so red :-)  One wooden item down, 999 to go......