Happy Moo Year Nengajo

New Year's is a very special time in Japan—a time for people to return to their ancestral homes, spend time with their families and get in touch with their roots. Perhaps the most honored and celebrated of the Japanese holidays, New Year’s (Oshogatsu) is a three-day event beginning with New Year's Eve and lasting through the first three days of the year. Preparations begin long in advance as people clean their homes from top to bottom, prepare traditional New Year's foods, and write nengajo, or New Year's greetings.
Nengajo are pretty postcards, either preprinted, or handmade that are sent to friends and family, in a similar fashion as a Christmas card, to wish them happiness in the New Year.
What is amazing to me is that the post office guarantees to deliver the greeting postcards by the first of January!
Prepaid New Year's postcards with lottery numbers are commonly used by Japanese people. The lottery's winning numbers are picked in mid-January. The prizes aren't money but are various household goods, such as electronics, stamps, and so on. Those prepaid postcards are basically plain, so people print photos or images, draw pictures, and write messages on their own.
Most of the postcards have the Chinese zodiac sign of the New Year as their design. Japanese people have a cycle of 12 years. Each year is represented by an animal. The animals are, in order:
Mouse, Cow, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Bird, Dog, Boar
The order cannot be moved. For example, 2009 is Cow (sometimes referred to as Ox) and 2010 will be Tiger. Those animals are traditionally incorporated into the New Year's Card design.
Though one can buy a card premade, the stationery stores are chock-full of cow stamps and stickers, colorful glitter pens and stamp pads, and pretty paper accents so that one can make their own nengajo. I can spend hours in any stationery store as I love office supplies ... notebooks, pens, sticky papers … but still, it’s the Japanese stuff that really make my heart sing. They’re practical, but they’re also cute and whimsical. I could not resist buying these delightful stamps to make my nengajo.
As a card-carrying gaijin (foreigner), I am theoretically exempt from the rules of sending nengajo. But I’ve decided to surprise my friends with my astounding nengajo knowledge and skill. The same gracious people that praise my ability to use chopsticks and poor attempts at speaking Japanese will be thrilled – I hope - with the consideration and effort of my handmade nengajo.
I wish all who receive one and all who read this blog a glorious New Year that rewards all your future endeavors with success. Happy Moo Year!

Elf Yourself

Office Max has this fun program on jibjab.com where you can upload your loved one's faces onto the bodies of elves. Once you have the elves you want, you can make them dance a variety of dances.

While the dance videos themselves are really cute, I wanted to take a screen shot so that I can scrap the picture. The way to do this is to click the little button on the top right of your keyboard that says 'print screen.' Here is the photo of my son's beautiful family. I really can't wait to get it scrapped!

Photo Mobile

These plain acrylic frames were for sale at Ikea in Yokohama and I thought they would make a great scrapbooked mobile. My son had been sending me tons of photos of their Great Dane and my two grandsons. Astro is a beautiful dog and he is so obviously a wonderful family pet. One look at any of the photos proves that fact. So, Astro and the boys were my inspiration for this project.

In Ikea, the frames were shown simply with two photos back-to-back so that a photo could be seen on each side of the acrylic frame. But the frame's square shape lent itself perfectly to mini scrapbook pages. I matted the pictures on either side of 6x6-inch squares of cardstock then sandwhiched them in the acrylic frames. The rest of the embellishments - including the journaling blocks - were placed on top of the acrylic. I used plenty of bling embellies so that when the mobile is hung, it will catch the light.

I really liked the idea of the pages being from Astro's perspective, so the project is entitled "Things I Taught My Masters". Each page showcases a different lesson, such as "When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close and nuzzle them gently"; or "When it is in your best interest, practice obedience".

My daughter-in-law takes some awesome pictures, which made this project enjoyable and ultimately attractive to display. Let's face it, scrapbooking is fun, but it's all about the pictures!

Jenny in Naha

Well, I know it is Christmas and you want to see some Christmas projects, but I don't want to give away any surprises. I'm going to show you a LO I did for Jenny from last Christmas that turned out to be one of my favorites. And it's sooo easy for you to recreate!

I used a big bloom stamp from Stampin' UP and stamped on Bazzill cardstock to make the border. I love the textural effect that the Bazzill gave that stamp. Added a few punched blooms and a bit of doodling with a sparkly bronze pen to complete the look.

I drew some wavy lines for the journaling and made each letter touch the top and bottom line. I am quite happy with the effect. What do you think?

Morning Calisthenics

In Japan, whether you work in a department store or on a construction site, the day opens with five minutes of mandatory calisthenics supervised by section chiefs. There must be something to it as I've heard the Japanese are the longest living people on the planet. I was in a hotel in downtown Tokyo on the 7th floor overlooking this construction site when I caught this group doing their morning thing.

Using Washi paper on your scrapbook LOs

When I first arrived in Japan, I fell down playing softball, broke my wrist and was not able to get any scrapbooking accomplished. However, I was able to go shopping so ideas began to swim around in my head about what I could make with all the beautiful washi (rice) papers I found. Once I got my cast off, this page became my first project.

First, I tore the washi around the edges, which was quite easy to do. It comes in really huge sheets, but I cut mine into 12x12 before tearing. Then the edges were inked and the entire thing was adhered to my background paper.

The photo was then double-matted on SEI papers from the Chocolat collection. I love the colors and feel of these beautiful papers. Before I glued the photo down, though, I took a Mizuhiki crane off of a greeting card and wrapped it around my photo. (more on Mizuhiki later). The title stickers are from the same SEI collection. A bit of bling, some ribbons and blooms and the page is almost done.

The journaling was added by running a piece of the SEI paper through my computer. The right end - though it does not show up well here - is folded over and underneath lies a tiny scrap of my cast. Someday, cast material may differ from the current material, so I wanted to keep a small bit for nostalgic reasons.

For the final touch, I used Daisy D's rub-on stitch tape around the border of the entire page. I didn't put my page in a protector right away, and some of the border tape rubbed off. All in all, I think the Japanese touches are quite pretty!

What is Mizuhiki? Mizuhiki is a ribbon-like paper cord made from washi and cut into long thin strips, twisted into strings then covered with a seaweed glue mixture to stiffen it. After the cord is formed it is polished or wrapped colored metallic paper for hundreds of beautiful color combinations. The finished cord is used to tie gifts for congratulations, condolences, and weddings. Most traditional Japanese money envelopes are tied with fanciful mizuhiki decorative knots such as the crane used in my LO. You can find many resources on the web if you wish to use Mizuhiki in your LOs.

Bios on the Hill

It has taken me some time to do something with the pictures of my time with my grandsons. They are the most charming little boys and we had such fun with them this summer - too short a time really. Such is the life of military families.

I started by crimping some white cardstock, spraying it with Glimmer Mist and building the rest around that. I took the patterned Bohemia papers and tore the edges, inked them with Color Box pigment ink and rolled them a bit for some dimension. I had the twine in my stash and decided to do a bit of lacing with it. I used the dotted mesh as a mat for the photo strip and I think it turned out pretty well. The journaling pulls out from behind that strip.

Not a bad LO for a double-page spread - those are always challenging!

Hope this page gives you some inspiration the next time you take some photos.

Love you boys and miss you!