If I could turn back time

aka having a great idea when it is really too late to do anything about it. Oh well!

The idea for this layout was also in a way inspired by the layout by Yukiko from the Pinterest board, although not as overtly as the last one.
As a reminder here is her layout

and here is mine

When I was first looking at her layout I thought I would die cut some hearts to go with this photo. I was really looking for a branch with hearts on (I'm not advanced enough on the Cameo to do this myself) but gave up when I didn't find one, used the branches on the other layout but did find these dangling hearts which I rather liked.
I cut them out and coloured them with gold and red glimmer mists. The cardstock that makes the photo mat on this layout is part of the "guts" of the background cardstock on the last layout, also coloured with red mist. (I painted the  mist on rather than sprayed. One of the things I would do differently if I could would be to spray and not paint. I didn't need to be so subtle!)

I was also inspired by the stripes. But rather than just use stripy paper (and the black/white stripes of that fab Heidi Swapp paper just weren't right), I decded to make my own stripes. So I carefully cut 12x 1" strips from the Carta Bella ombre paper. I laid them onto the cardstock and drew lines where I wanted them to be, then removed them and cut the other papers just a bit wider than 1" so there wouldn't be any difficulty lining them up.
The other papers were trimmed and adhered, followed by the blue paper.
Only I had forgotten about the ombre effect and the strips are not in the right order. But I only noticed after everything else was stuck on top!

I knew that I wanted to use those three badges under the photo - they were perfect in colour and what they said for this layout about my wedding anniversary. Photo went down, title and date stickers, hearts dangling from the top (in fact they don't dangle they are stuck fast and so that is something else that needs a change). I added some of the gold enamel dots - lovely. Journalling and an arrow sticker. Done.

But it all looked a bit "meh". So I added some drops of gold mist everywhere.
Good but... not great.
Then I remembered the gold thread.
THEN
after everything was stuck down I looked at that thread and thought "Wouldn't it be great if all the strips had gold thread sewn across them".
I thought about pulling it all off.
I managed to talk myself out of that.
I compromised by adding hand stitching to the top and bottom row.
(I doubled two long skeins ie so I had four threads per stitch. I pricked the cardstock layer about every centimetre. You have to be quite patient  and gentle with the thread and paper as it is quite fiddly and time consuming. But that is what the TV is for!)

More gold machine stitching on those stripes? Would have looked awesome.
I'm glad I added the stitching I did - it makes it all more complete.
But everytime I look at this I will think "Why didn't that come to me sooner?"
Ah well, tomorrow is another layout!