The North Star

In March 2022, I traveled north to Auburn, NY, for a meetup with my NPTC friends. The Harriet Tubman National Historic Park scheduled a celebration of her 200th birthday (or nearly — no one really knows her exact date of birth). Friday, I drove up, and the weather was fine. However, Friday night, a winter storm came in, and I watched the parking lot from my hotel room as several inches of snow accumulated. Saturday morning, I cautiously headed out to our meetup location. Harriet Tubman lived in this area after she ceased her work on the Underground Railroad and spying for the Union during the Civil War. The white building is her home and has been registered as a National Historic Landmark. The ladies in the blue-and-yellow tops are from a group that holds walks to support civil rights. They held one in the area for the birthday celebration, and we found them at the homestead that morning. I was impressed that they walked in all that snow. 

This layout is based on Noreen Smith's February 2026 1-2-3+ layout. Truly. I know if you look at her demo, it's not quite the same. I flipped the left and right pages, then rotated the right page 90 degrees because I had more horizontal photos. I used a sheet of paper from a very old CM paper pack called Reflections Winter Additions. The Plus paper is a sheet of lichen cardstock that I used to make the snowflake punched borders and the photo mats. The stickers were from a different collection, but matched pretty well. The stickers in the kit didn't really match my theme. The bonus from using that particular border maker cartridge is that you get little snowflakes punched from the middle of the circles. I adhered those with a Xyron sticker maker.

Top 3!

 Just a little self-congratulation. My little mice made one of the top 3 picks for the Lasting Memories April Challenges!

On the Quad

Hello again from Springfield, Massachusetts! This is the last entry in my blog for the Springfield Armory meetup in December 2021. The album continues with my visit to several interesting museums in town. Please come see me to view the pages of the Dr. Seuss Museum and even a Friendly's original restaurant display! 

After completing the visitor center displays, I walked outside and toured the different buildings remaining around the perimeter of the quad. The larger homes housed the Armory Commanders and their families. The longer buildings served as offices, laboratories, and even manufacturing centers. This was a major employer during WWII, with over 13,000 people participating in the effort — many of them women. Some of the buildings have been converted to use as the community college with classrooms, gymnasiums, and auditoriums. The rest are not open for touring at this time. After our tour, our group headed to lunch. Come back next time, and we'll look at more wintry weather as I head north to Harriet Tubman in New York.

This layout is also based on one of Noreen Smith's April sketches from Scrap Your Stash. Our goal for this challenge was to use mats from our kits. I chose a Bo Bunny set of papers called "Mamarazzi," which is about how family photographers take so many photos that they become part of the press! I liked the distressed tones of the paper. There were some cut-apart sheets that I used for the mats on the bottom left and bottom right. The other mats under the photos are just trimmed papers--though that certainly uses up the stash as well! Now that I remember I own this, you may be seeing it more on historic buildings!

Not music you can dance to

Welcome back to my tour of the Springfield Armory from December 2021. One of the highlights of the visitor center is this large rack of muskets, called the Rifle Organ, created in the 1840s. It's meant to be storage, though it was created specifically to impress (the original order was for 36 of these cubes — arranged in one room, it would certainly be a sight). The poet Longfellow and his wife visited, and his wife compared the long barrels to those on an organ in a church, and the moniker stuck. It impressed them in the wrong way as she declared it a "death organ". Nonetheless, that's where we decided to collect for our group photo for the meetup. One other interesting photo is tacked on here on the left. If you zoom in, you can see some of the spectacular fails of guns that exploded either during construction and testing or, unfortunately, during use by a soldier.

I created this layout during Noreen Smith's Scrap Your Stash virtual crop weekend at the end of April. She created 8 sketches for us and encouraged us to use our hoarded supplies. For this one, the goal was to use up collections that had just strips of paper left. I chose the CM Legacy of Love collection, and yes, it's getting low on paper! I felt the banners on the left needed something to "seal" the edge, so I added a thin laser-cut border to the top.

Big Guns

Our tour of the armory included watching the video. Inside the theater is a long row of large machine guns — another product of Springfield. I'm not a gun enthusiast, but I have to say the visitor center kept my attention.

This layout is based on Noreen Smith's April 2026 1-2-3-Plus sketch. I found a sheet of green stars-and-stripes paper in my military stash and realized that by just cutting it in half, I would get the same effect as her layout. I layered those on gray cardstock, then chose a sheet of camouflage paper for the mats. I looked through the CM collection called "Through the Years," which has sets of paper and stickers from all the decades of the 1900s. The title sticker and "Vintage" sticker came from the 1920s-30s kit. The gun stickers were from my military stash. 

The displays continued with an overview of the materials needed for the World Wars. I liked the statues of the soldiers, defining how the uniforms and weaponry changed in just 20 years. You might remember this from a few weeks ago, when I posted it as a bonus entry for the Lasting Memories This or That challenges.

You can click on this link to go back to the original post for a description of how I put this together.

Gearing Up

Welcome back to my Springfield Armory trip in December 2021. Our group met a ranger inside the museum, who provided a tour of some of the displays. This armory has existed since the late 1700s, so the machinery has undergone many upgrades over time. What we saw was close to the mid-1900s (WWII era). By walking around the gears, we could examine the various pieces of guns and other armaments that were built here. In the early years, guns were built one at a time, with a single craftsman creating all the components. As the industrial age progressed, guns were made to be interchangeable so that a broken part would not render an entire gun useless. 

This layout is based on one of Meggan and Tessa's Power Hours from January 2025. I thought the chevrons would provide some movement around the layout. I chose one of the last papers from this paper pack (and when I remember the name, I will tell you). The gray side with the lines was perfect. The reverse side had more of a floral look, but once it was cut, it was less noticeable. It sort of looks like coffee stains. I chose a gear-border maker cartridge for the edges and a few additional arrow stickers for embellishments. I thought the "All Together" title was appropriate, as you can see our group listening to the ranger in the first 2 photos. 

Is there a Field of Springs?

Hello and welcome to the kick-off of my December 2021 trip to Springfield, Massachusetts. Yes, December 2021 was a big travel month for me. One of the NPTC club members grew up near Boston and planned a trip home over the holidays. She decided to hold a club meetup at Springfield Armory. It was a site I hadn't been to previously, and I found that I could easily take the Amtrak Train to the city and walk to the park! That piqued my interest, so I planned a little getaway. The blog will feature a few layouts from the trip, but there was much more that I saw around town during my weekend visit. If you have a chance to go to Springfield, plan for at least a couple of days. 

This trip will, of course, get its own album. You might recognize this page from my bonus post on April 12th. Refresh your memory here.

On Saturday morning, I walked up the hill from my hotel to the Springfield Armory site. As you can see, the weather was nice for New England in December! The Armory was not quite open when I got to the bottom gate. As this was my first visit, I didn't know where the main entrance was, so I took photos here and kept walking up the hill. The land is now shared with a community college, so I knew that area would be open, and I was right. It added many steps to my journey, but it gave me a chance to see the quad as I approached the main building. 

I based this layout on Cheryl Even's Sketch #64. I liked the 6x4 photo stretched across the bottom, which I could replace with the park's unigrid. Since the gate pillars were brick, I chose a torn piece of brick paper for the bottom border element. The only other decoration is a border of rifles that I cut apart and tucked around the photos. The background paper is a sheet of gray tonal paper from my stash. I liked the texture of the brush strokes, which gave subtle highlights to the photos.