Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Evolutions...continued

Well, that was a fun meander through memory lane. I noticed Amy Oya makes an appearance on 3 of the pages I featured yesterday. (Correction: She is only on 2 of the lay outs, but she was present at the wedding. She acted as our interpreter for the Japanese guests!)

After arriving in Japan, I felt sort of empty without my hobby. I mean, everyone needs a hobby, right? When my parents visited us in 2003, I asked Mom to bring some of my scrapbooking stuff with her. Thank god she did. As soon as they left, I set up a table in the corner of our tatami room and got to work making an album to commemorate their trip to Japan. I was finally starting to feel like my old self again!

Having been out of commission for more than 2 years, I began studying up on new techniques and I soon found there was a whole world of scrapbooking out there. In fact, there was more to scrapbooking than Creative Memories. This theme has come again in my life recently, but at that time, I discovered their were lots of techniques and ideas that CM had never promoted, so when I made our Music Tour album, I decided to employ several new crafting techniques just to challenge myself.




6 Music City Tour - Old Spaghetti Factory in Nashville.
I love Nashville, if you didn't already guess that. My lay outs started looking a little better, and I even printed small sized photos on my home printer once in a while. I also started to do my journaling on the computer, but rather than print directly on the card stock, I used MS word to change the colors of text boxes. At the time, I thought I was ultra-cool. I also used ribbons and brads...ooh ooh la la.



7 Music City Tour - More brads and oh, sepia toned photos!
Yes, I really got into using brads for a while. Then, I also printed some of the photos in sepia tone to give it an old-fashioned look. And, rather than printing on regular paper, I printed my journaling and sub-titles on vellum. That began my love affair with vellum. By the way, my husband said his head spins when he looks at this page. A little too much for the eye to handle, perhaps?


8 Almost been to Graceland - Brads, torn photo mats, crumbled paper, ribbon
What more could you ask for? I was really experimenting with this album!



9 Fun collages with text and photos
I went through a phase where I wanted to make collages out of my photos. It was trendy at the time! I didn't want to forget all the cool names of New Orleans food that we either ate or read on menus. The design is supposed to resemble a window pane, much like those you would see in the French Quarter. Looking back, I am not sure why I chose to use orange though! I am pretty sure there are no orange window panes there!

After this album, everything changed for me! Just you wait!

3 comments:

illahee said...

very interesting!!

i never got into scrapbooking. i tried!! i worked at jo-ann fabrics and crafts and i even got a few albums, paper and cutting tools, but...*sigh* i love looking at your evolution, though.

when i came to japan, of course i brought my cross stitch with me. i would have lost it if i didn't have it! i'm glad your mom brought your scrapbooking stuff!

illahee said...

oh, i forgot to ask: what's up with the picture in your header? it's kinda....sideways...

Amy said...

What a wonderful stroll down memory lane!!! I have a lot of the same pictures from our past travels together, but unfortunately, they're all tucked away in shoeboxes...

I love your evolutions...