Friday Flashback: Dream Gardens

Welcome to this week's Friday Flashback!  Today I get to feature one of my favorite stamp sets, Dream Gardens.  Since I used to live in Japan, I pretty much buy every Oriental stamp set Stampin' Up! makes ;)  So let's flash back!

I discovered pretty early on that I love this lady stamped in craft ink on patterned paper and then heat embossed.

I did Japanese Christmas cards one year.  See, you can use a non-Christmas stamp set and make perfectly festive Christmas cards.

Alternate Christmas card design; my hubs liked this one because he said the layout reminded him of kimonos with the obi around the middle.

Quick and easy thank you card for some friends of ours whom we met in Okinawa.

I shared these pages a few months ago and I was unhappy because I did the title and then decided to mat the kimono lady instead of stamping her directly on the paper, so it looked out of whack to me with too much space above the title.  It stuck in the back of my head for a while and finally I got it back out and added the little origami crane from Gifts from the Orient and voila!  Fixed.

And here's today's new card:

I love blues and greens together, they're very peaceful to me.  Something about using shades of those two colors together just makes me happy...which might be why 98% of the stuff we own is blue and/or green ;)  Anyway, I pulled out my favorite Baja Breeze (sniffle! please don't really be retired forever) and I picked the two stamps I'd never used from the stamp set.  I love that dream kanji stamp, don't know how it hadn't been used on something before.  And I used a couple of DSP scraps on this too.

Thanks for joining me for this week's Friday Flashback.  Have a wonderful weekend!

Supplies, last card only:
Stamps:  Dream Gardens
Ink:  Baja Breeze, Always Artichoke, Midnight Muse
Paper:  Baja Breeze, Midnight Muse, Very Vanilla, Always Artichoke retired DSP, retired Green Tea DSP
Accessories:  circle punches, Dimensionals