Thomas Jefferson and George Mason

Happy National Scrapbook Day! As this is posting, I'm at a weekend scrap to celebrate the event. Creative Memories began this day many years ago on the first Monday in May.

This layout is part of my visit around Washington DC and I wanted to walk the Tidal Basin. I had never been to any of those memorials and I was excited to see them all. Each one will get its own post on the blog, so stick with me over the next few weeks to see them all.

First up is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. What an enormous statue! It's a beautiful memorial with text of his famous documents engraved on the walls. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the photos. Not sure why they came out so blurry this time.

This layout was created with what Creative Memories calls a "Project Recipe". I have the original PDF version, but you can see the idea page here through a pin on Pinterest. So, you'll notice there's no blue in my layout. That's because I used paper from the Imagine paper pack. I wanted the black and red colors as this is a very bold set of photos. The contrast color of yellow actually threw me for a bit but as I look at my creation, I'm liking it more and more. I changed some photos for the unigrid, one for a die cut of a camera, and one for a journal box. Like page sketches, the project recipes are starting points. Make the layout work for you, don't try to jam your photos into something that doesn't tell the story.

Very close to the Jefferson Memorial is a little known memorial for George Mason. He was instrumental in assisting with the creation of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Definitely a forgotten hero.

This layout was created from a sketch. The idea is to use one piece of double-sided paper and cut and arrange it to highlight 3 photos. Here is the sketch. As you can see, I turned it 90-degrees to the left because my photos were oriented slightly differently. The red paper and striped paper are the same page, just 2 different sides. The stars are a border sticker that I thought worked well. I didn't use as many stickers as recommended, but I don't see any "bare" areas that concern me.