Back from Japan

Hello all and welcome! I have finally returned from my trip to Japan, and as perfect timing would have it, I was delighted to be invited by Eileen Hull to create a journal cover with her Journal Die from her new Heartfelt Collection.

As regular visitors will know, before leaving for Japan I started a Midori traveller's journal to take along on te trip, if you missed it you can see some of the prepped pages here and here, and as Eileen's new die is just the right size for Midori notebooks, I knew it would make for the perfect cover.

I'll give you a quick step by step how I made it:

First I painted the covers with a mix of Golden Titan Buff and Victorian Velvet Distress  acrylic paints, scraped on with a little craft scraper.

Next  I added some Japanese text pages. These came from a vintage Japanese book picked up in a little antique store in Kyoto. It is printed on very delicate tissue paper, just perfect for mixed media projects.

Then I created a little front panel. The background was done with Oxide Distress Inks in Worn Lipstick, Broken China and  Vintage Photo. I then stencilled a cherry blossom branch with a Crafters Workshop stencil using Distress crayons and added a little Japanese stamp, picked up in a stationer's shop in Tokyo. I am sorry to say I actually have no idea what it says..... Here is a close up:

I added a bit of shadow with coloured pencils to bring out the flowers (it was of course cherry blossom season, Sakura as the Japanese call it), and a bit of foiling using a glue stick as well as some flowers etc from my stash.

Here you can see the front and back. The back page just had some scraps of a paper napkin and some Japanese washi tape added to it still.

The inside of the covers was done with paper from the new Tim Holtz Memoranda collection. It seemed to fit the junk journal style of some of my inner pages just perfectly.

The title was done with an additional little die that comes with the main journal die.

The spine has some charms, the Japanese one can be used as a bookmark for the inside.

The closure, another little die that comes with the main one, was adhered to the back cover and then tucks perfectly under the front panel as you can see below:

As the front panel was adhered with foam tape there is just the right space and this makes it super easy and quick to open and shut and as I plan to make several further inserts, there is still loads of space inside this brilliant cover die. 

Here are a few of the inside pages still, mostly all done while in Japan:

And finally, because so many of you asked for it, some photos taken during the trip. We literally took hundreds of photos, so this is just a tiny selection lol.

 One of the numerous temples we visited, this one is in the hills, just outside Osaka.

View of the countryside around the temple

View of a bamboo grove outside Kyoto

 A Shinto shrine

Cherry blossom season, a view near our apartment in Kyoto

And finally, just a few family picks, meeting up with our grand children was one of the main reasons we went there in the first place....

The oldest, 4.5 years old

And the younger one, nearly three.

Having some fun in one of the temple gardens while mum and dad were exploring

Well that's it for today....Japan is the most amazing country and we definitely plan to go back some time. Thanks for staying with me through this mammoth post and until next time!

xxxxx