Layout: Cherry Blossoms

In the spring I found this lovely cherry blossom paper at the LSS. It's by Paper House. Since we usually go as a family to see the cherry blossoms in DC every year, I went ahead and bought it in the hopes that we would go again this year. Depending on how the paper is oriented, you get a different pattern of the blossoms. It has a stone background, so while it can be turned a quarter of a turn, it doesn't look quite as nice that way.

I don't usually do "fussy cutting" very often, but I did for this layout. I'd gotten all my photos adhered to the paper when I realized that I'd made a mistake in both the fussy cutting and picture placement. I didn't know if I could get any more of the paper, so I tried swapping the positions of the paper. The two layouts below were how all the pages were supposed to look, and the lack of variety across the 4 page layout had bothered me a little. With my mistake, I ended up swapping left and right pages, so the left ended up on the right, and vice versa. That's when I got the lovely spray of cherry blossoms going through the middle.

I don't know if you can see in the photo, but I cut out some of the individual cherry blossoms from an extra sheet of the paper, and I popped the blossoms on top of the cherry blossoms of the background paper, which gave it a little dimension. The bottom two pages don't have the popped blossoms added to them yet, but I've included them anyway so that you can see how a "mistake" turned out nicer than the layout had been originally planned. I'll add the flowers to the second pages the next time I go to crop with one of my scrapping friends, but I didn't want to wait to show the layout till then.

The stickers on the journal mats were given to me by a dear scrapping friend. I hadn't originally planned to use them, but they added a very nice touch, too. The stickers are by EK Success.

All in all, it's a simple layout using really old techniques, but I'm happy with it.