STITCHING AWAY

Just a page to share:

I decided to whip out the needle and thread onto the paper to see what I could do and decided to try my hand at stiching the title. I lightly traced out my title freehand with a pencil and took my paper piecer and made all the holes just a few millimetres apart. 

For the border, I broke into the seweasy tool and gave it a whirl. Of course you can see that I haven't mastered the art of the straight line yet.

I love this set of alphabet sets, which look like they came out of a typewriter (which is really something I would love to get my hands on).

Supplies: Lily Bee Designs, Cosmo Cricket  

WANDERLUST

Traveling has always been in my blood. I love going to explore a new country, even though admittedly it can be tiring, but the life experience you get from especially traveling solo is not what anything else can give you.

Of course people have asked, why don't you travel with people or wait for friends to go together, but being alone is good, for the mind and soul and the  embracing of what life is.

And of course the footwear which accompanies me to every country I can wear it, barring winter. 

Love the twine that swirls around behind the letters at the bottom of the page to give the layout some movement. And the diecut paper makes it look like a stamp, which I like

Hidden journaling in tag behind photo.

Supplies: October Afternoon, Studio Calico 

NEW YORK NEW YORK

I had the opportunity to visit the city that never sleeps in June for a full week. It was packed full of fun and activity, really earning its name. I was actually even shopping at Forever 21 at Times Square after midnight on a week day.

I made a scrapbook on the road, or rather a photo album which I slotted in all my memorabilia. After coming back I printed out my photos and added relevant journaling.

Supplies: Sassafras, Studio Calico, Fancy Pants,American Crafts, Crate Paper, October Afternoon

The epitome of New York City is Times Square where at all times of the day there is always people and the place is always packed. And the Avenue of Stars was my inspiration for the layout.  I lay out the veneer stars and misted the entire background to make the stars stand out. The filmstrip stamped out also pays tribute to the theatre industry, Broadway. The title draws inspiration from the song "New York New York". I also ran my Sew Easy along the bottom strip of the layout with the zig zag head attached to the body.

A POST-JAPAN LAYOUT

June, July and the early part of August have been laced with travels and work, so I haven't been around much, returning not too long ago from Japan. So apologies for not having blogged.

Well, my job involves travel, and one unique opportunity I had was to go to the areas struck by the tsunami in March to document the post-tsnuami recovery, especially in the coastal towns in the Tohoku region.

To prepare, I spent two and a half weeks binge reading about the tsunami and the recovery efforts that were taking place, while emailing every single person possible to build my contact base and get help in the land. All this without a translator and not being able to speak a sentence of Japanese.

Luckily for me, there were angels sent down that helped me in getting around as well as translating and navigating me around the area.

In my layout are the two places that I had visited and the photos that I took that impacted me the most, a salute to my photojournalism teacher (I hope). Kept the layout simple as it really is about the pictures as I journaled about my feelings, particularly as I never thought that I would be doing this out of school. 

This was put together quickly with the scraps I had on my table, as I just wanted to document how I was feeling at that point of time. The camera tin pin from October Afternoon and the typewriter tag from American Crafts for me, illustrate what I was doing there.

Other supplies: Studio Calico, Jenni Bowlin, American Crafts, Hambly Studios

Have you made a layout about your job or what it means to you? I think you should, no matter what your feelings towards it at the moment, as like it or not, it plays a great part in terms of the time it takes up in our life at least (: