Altered Arts Magazine: China town album

I have been wanting to get these photos from my trip to Chinatown into some sort of album for quite some time now... and I finally did it! So I thought I'd share it with you.

I decided to use these chip tiles from Tattered Angels to create this album.

I started with six separate boards. I worked on each of them individually, and when they were all completed, I punched holes in each of them and attached them together with fibers.

Each board was sprayed with different colors of Glimmer Mist. After the pages were completely dried, I used gold embossing powder to highlight the edges and raised designs on the chipboard. I also embossed the separate chipboard pieces as I added them to the page design.

I didn't want the chipboard letters to be totally covered with the gold embossing powder, so I was careful just to go over random areas on each letter with my embossing pad.

I embossed the edges of each page by just scraping my embossing pad along the page's edge, then adding my embossing powder, and heating with my heat tool.

You can see that the chipboard pieces come already "dry embossed" with words and designs, so it's easy to just drag your embossing pad or ink pad over the high spots on the tiles to highlight the designs even more.

To create the design on the right side of this page, I used a screen. After the page was dry, I used my fine tip black marker and traced around the edges of the design.

The design on the left side of the page below is also created with a screen. The right side is the embossed design on the tile. I added a tag to hang in the middle of the pages for the journaling.

The design on the tag is a stamp.

Below is the backside of the same tag.

Here you can really see the effect you get when rubbing an inkpad over the high spots on the dry embossed tile. Just lightly rubbing an inkpad over the design brings out the design and makes it really stand out beautifully.

On the right hand page below, I used an embossed chipboard piece. After spraying it with red Glimmer Mist and letting it dry, I ran a black inkpad over it to make the design really predominate. The red background of the pages was done .. again.. using a screen.

Here you can see it a bit closer.

This is the back cover of my book. I love these rich colors! I had so much fun creating this album; and I'm thrilled that I've finally done something with the photos from this fun trip. This book is now sitting on the table in my living room so I can share it with my family and friends. So much more fun then those photos that were just sitting in a box, right?

I hope you feel inspired to pull out some photos you love and create something you can share.

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I have to share this photo from CHA. It was so great to get to see Cyndi and Clara and chat with them a bit! The photo below, left to right - me, Clara, Cyndi, and Sandy Redburn (owner of Crafty Secrets Heartwarming Vintage)

Dinner.. next year girls!