Visiting Japan...with Creative Imaginations

It seems I'm getting a little carried away with my family anecdotes (and teenage horror stories), so I'm going to make a concerted effort to post more scrapbooking pages.

When I started this blog in June, I was working with the new Creative Imaginations "Sakura Collection" and created a couple of display layouts for my local scrapbook store Scrap-A-Lot.

I was pretty excited about these papers because back in the "olden days" (according to my kids), 1980 to be exact, I travelled to Japan on an exchange with the Lions Club.  All my photos and memorabilia from that 6-week trip are suffering their fate in a humongous magnetic album....yes, the kind where the plastic page cover lifts up and you place your photos on a sticky page background, knowing the contents will disintegrate within 10 years.

Ironically, however, I used a photo from a Scrap-A-Lot friend named Fran, who was also excited about scrapping her trip to Asia....which was much more recent than mine.  So while I was looking at her photos, I found the most lovely pic of cherry blossoms and was inspired to create this page for Fran.

Gosh, it was hard to photograph this shiny gold paper!

I wrote the Haiku...as I'm sure you all did in Grade 8 middle school English class...

The chipboard bird comes from a package of chipboard elements, all in neutral cream and brown...I added some gold metallic paint to coordinate with all the gold on the page.

 I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the package of chipboard...grrrrrr.

Just love working with the Melissa Frances elements...I gilded her white resin pieces.

For the pro scrapbookers out there, you can probably skip this next tutorial, but I thought I'd post LOTS of photos that show how I created this page.  Just because I always like lots of photos when I read a blog.  LOTS.

Here goes...

One of my favourite Martha Stewart border punches of all time...I punched the edges of the heavy gold metallic cardstock.

I gently lifted up the butterflies from the background glitter paper to give them dimension.

The thrifty scrapbooker cuts away the section of her background glitter paper that will be wasted and unseen beneath the gold metallic background paper.  I placed the gold cardstock on top of this pink glitter frame.

Yikes!  Who in their right mind wants to cut out ALL these lovely blossoms?

Not me!  My sweet super fussy cutting friend Kim, the owner of Scrap-A-Lot, cut this paper for me!

I placed these gorgeous floral cuttings on top of the gold cardstock.

I adore these Melissa Frances vintage embellishments!

To gild them (add gold accents), I simply used my metallic gold Ranger paint dauber.  That paint is the best and I use it all the time to add beautiful gold touches to lots of my page elements....you could say it's worth its weight in "gold"...hee hee!

Just touch the raised edges of the resin designs.

Here's a closer look of the finished result...

These corners ended up at the bottom of the gold metallic background as page corners.

I used the two floral gilded elements to frame the photo....

To weave the ribbon along the edges of the glitter cardstock mat, I punched holes with my Crop-a-dile...2 holes at about 1 1/2" intervals...and yes, I used a ruler to measure.

Yikes! that Crop-a-dile looks like a monster next to these delicate cherry blossoms...kinda like the Godzilla of scrapbooking tools!

A wide soft sheer pink ribbon worked well to create this effect....

Here is another photo I took of the page outside in the sunlight...so you could see it SHINE!

And now you know all the deep dark secrets behind creating this Cherry Blossoms layout!

Hope you enjoyed looking at LOTS of photos  :)