Greetings from Shanghai! A layout for Gypsy Soul Lasercuts

                      Well hello there crafty friends-or          

            你好朋友   

as they say in Shanghai China, where my son has spent the last 10 months in university learning the language.

He's coming home for the summer tomorrow (yay!!) so I decided to create another page with some of the photos he emailed me, as well as a couple items he sent back with some friends of ours from hi trip to Hong Kong in February (the gold coins and the red envelope behind the photo)....as well as some great pieces of Gypsy Soul chipboard from the Oriental shape set!

This building is one of the dorms on campus at Fudan university where Graham was staying and I thought the paper with the touches of red was perfect to showcase it.

I had so much fun with the chipboard lantern strip! I started out doing all of them with the pleated paper in different colours/patterns, but didn't really like the effect so I decided to change it up a bit and just fussy cut and pop up a few bits for dimension on some of them-and I found that brown diecut lattice in my scrap box and loved the way it looked on the long lantern! The strip was heat embossed in gold to coordinate with the gold coins and the writing on the envelope. I also popped up the two red lanterns that were printed on the paper for a little more dimension and interest.

For the fan in the lower right corner I fussy cut some flower designs from the reverse of the paper and layered them over each other. The edges and lower part were all heat embossed with the gold that I used on the lantern piece.

I stencilled  with texture paste on the page, did a little punching on some of the edges ,and misted in gold and red. 

Keep in mind that you don't have to go to China to find uses for this lovely chipboard set....it would be great for scrapping a visit to a Chinese restaurant, a page about your Chinese zodiac animal (I'm a horse!) or even what your fortune cookie says! I'm sure you could think of lots of other interesting ways to use these pieces-and I'd love it if you'd share some of your ideas with me!

Wishing you a wonderful and creative week!

Gypsy Soul Items Used
 Oriental Shape Set

Other Items Used

Kaisercraft Serenity paper
Prima stencils
Heidi Swapp and Dylusions mists