Up Against a Wall

This post continues our discussion of Fort Washington during the 2021 NPTC convention. The tour included lunch and a cannon firing demonstration. You'll see the cannon next time. We grabbed our box lunches when they arrived and tried to find a bit of shade to eat. There were no picnic tables within the fort grounds, so we formed a line along one of the walls that offered some shade. This is another location with a LOT of stamps, so they put tables out in front of the commander's house for us to do our thing. That's the bottom right photo. 

This sketch is based on a sketch that CM provided to advisors. When we offered more Theme packs (which consisted of a couple of printed papers, a sheet of cardstock, and a sheet of stickers), they wanted to share ideas on how to use them to create pages. You can view the sketch here, and if you click "visit site," you should be able to download a copy if you haven't seen it already. I used the Bedazzled collection for these pages, along with some brighter, more patriotic papers. One sheet of paper is split across the bottom of the page. Another paper is cut at 5" and 1" twice and then layered on top (using both sides of the paper). The border across the middle is a brick border punch, and it picks up the walls in the photos perfectly. I had actually toyed with brick paper as the background, but honestly, the images were getting lost. The sketch shows some 3x4 pictures at the bottom left and right. I chose to make a couple of banners for each side as decoration. 

A New Slant to the Fort

Today, we continue the 2021 NPTC convention in DC. The next stop on the Friday bus trip was to Fort Washington. Two of the park's more interesting features have little to do with the military fort. In the layout below, you will see the Eastern Cedar tree that is growing at a slant. It makes you look twice to decide which of you is on more solid footing! Another reason to stop at this fort is to visit the Fort Washington Lighthouse. I've featured that before, when I participated in the Maryland Lighthouse Challenge. The planned bus stop didn't allow me enough time to walk down and see it up close again, but I could see it from the fort walls.

To make this layout, I chose to use a sketch from Cheryl Even's work with Split Coast Stampers. I wanted to use this as a kick-off page, as I knew the remaining photos would all take 2 pages for the story. I used Sweet Blossom for this page. You may not notice it right away, but the papers are all 11.5" long. That creates a 1/4" border around the layout. The background is beige cardstock, so it's a subtle difference, but I like that it isn't too garish. I needed to trim the 4x6 journal box to fit the space, so I ended up cutting one of the corners; however, it didn't impact my ability to journal.

Please Stamp Politely

Today's post is the last entry for the Frederick Douglass stop on the NPTC bus trip. This is more about the club and our members instead of the site, though. Stamping is an obsession with some of our club members. We like to find and stamp all the variations of a stamp (all caps? mixed upper and lower letters? with a period after D.C., without a period after DC? Those little details are important to us). Frederick Douglass has always been a site with a considerable supply of stamps (as of this posting, there were 18 different stamps available in the visitor center). With over 100 stampers converging on the site, they wisely moved all the stamps to the front yard where we could form a line and get our images. I wish I could say that it was orderly. As I was trying to get stamps (and trying to logically keep them all separate from what I had and hadn't used yet), people in the line behind me were reaching over me and moving the stamps about as if I were not even there! I know I'm not the only person who has experienced that, and it saddens me to see that sort of behavior. If you are a club member, I urge you to act politely and responsibly when visiting our 433 (current) units. The staff will appreciate it, and so will your fellow club members.

This layout was supposed to be another bonus post, but I goofed up on the directions. The June challenges at Lasting Memories focused on using a series of specific paper sizes when creating a layout. For challenge #755, it was three 5" squares, three 1.5x5" strips, and three 2" circles. I noticed that one of the designers had used three squares and three strips to create a block in the middle of the page. I started there but moved the pieces around a bit more and used the strips as borders. I filled the top and bottom of the page with borders (a set of 3 star banners in red, white, and blue for the top and half of a boot border punch for the bottom). The papers for the 3 squares came from a 6x6 paper pad in my Patriotic collection. I struggle with those pre-cut sizes, but I was happy to be able to use them in this manner. I added my journaling to the page and photographed it as DONE. And when I went to post my link, I realized--I forgot the circles! So I  couldn't post the layout to the challenge, and I wasn't interested in going back and trying to figure out where to add the circles. So the most we can say about it is it was INSPIRED by the challenge. It's still one more page done in the album!

Porch Talks

Today's blog continues our look at the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. This is our 2nd stop on the NPTC Friday bus tour in 2021. Although we were divided into two groups for two separate ranger talks, in reality, everyone gathered in front of the porch as the rangers tag-teamed one talk for us. Both were excellent speakers. The one in the photo on the right had also been a speaker at our virtual convention in 2020 (and you'll see him again in another blog entry). 

For this layout, I used the Project Recipe for Passport to Adventure, featuring Passport to Adventure papers. (A rarity, I know!) The background cardstock is Canary, and I made my cuts using the green arrow paper (this time because it matches the rangers' outfits) and the street map paper (which looks like a blueprint). Both of those were scraps from other projects, so I used navy cardstock to create the mats. I punched out the circles from a remnant of gold paper and added some circle stickers, as well as another passport stamp design from one of the photo mats.

Looking Down on DC

Welcome back to the 2021 NPTC Convention. The next stop on our bus trip was the Frederic Douglass House. I've been here once before, but it was nice to revisit. On this trip, we did not go through the house, so I'm glad I had that experience previously. Frederick Douglass purposefully built his house up on the hill so that he could literally "look down" on Washington, DC. He was not a fan of politics as he struggled to fight for civil rights for all. The room on the bottom of the right page was his "Growlery," and I imagine he spent a lot of time there grumbling about politicians.

If part of this layout looks familiar, it's because the right page was a bonus post for a Lasting Memories Challenge. The rules of the challenge said that a double-page layout would have to incorporate at least 2 of the exact paper sizes from the challenge. I didn't need to do that, so I omitted the left side from my entry. I like the unigrid from here because of the full-page photo of Douglass. It complements the heritage papers I selected nicely. The strip along the left is a laser-cut border that I back-filled with the gold and red papers you see on the right-hand page.

Feathered Friends

Today's blog will finish up my visit to Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. But don't worry, there's more to the 2021 NPTC Convention yet to come!

In addition to the lovely flowers in the park, there are opportunities to see wildlife that you wouldn't expect in a city like Washington, D.C. The ducks might not be exotic, but I was surprised to see the great white egrets hunting for fish. We also saw blue herons, but I didn't capture them on film. 

For this layout, I used the Flourish Project Recipe from Creative Memories. I continued using the Sweet Blossoms fast-to-fabulous papers, and this time turned the borders to the bottom. If you look at the original recipe, you will see that I flipped the pages as I wanted the circular photos on the right. I didn't think about it when I created the page, but it's like looking at them through a telescope! Since I had more photos on the other page than the recipe called for, I didn't need to fill the top of the page with more than a small title sticker. But on the right, I wanted a bit more at the top. The Love border is on the back of one of the mat papers, and I trimmed that with the border at the top and bottom for a bit of definition.

Wild Flowers

In today's post, we continue our exploration of Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens at the 2021 NPTC Convention. In addition to the numerous lotus plants, there is a rich assortment of hibiscus and other plants. (And look at the size of that leaf! It's as large as my head!) The brown "thing" is a dried lotus pod, so I suppose that should have been included in the previous layout.

I created this layout based on the CM Project Recipe, 'Bottanical Burst'. I used two sheets of Sweet Blossom paper, which is in the Fast-to-Fabulous style (meaning the borders are pre-printed). I turned the borders to the middle of both pages, so I got a bonus change of color there. I used a piece of white cardstock to create the circle, cut it in half, and layered a tonal paper between the edge of the border and the circle. I punched a leaf border from that same tonal paper and made minor cuts so that it would flow around the circle. It took 3 strips of border to complete the page. The title and sticker flowers were from the same kit, and I finished the page quickly.