Snowbirds

Welcome back to the March 2022 visit to the Harriet Tubman Historical Park in Auburn, NY. After the celebration in the visitor center, our group headed outside to the Harriet Tubman statue for our official group photo. My friend Melania came a little later, so  I had a separate photo with her too.

For this layout, I used one of the CM Project Recipes for the "Flurry of Fun" kit, but used the "Glacier" paper pack. I didn't have the mitten border maker cartridge (yes, there are some I DON'T have!) Instead, I chose the boots, but that meant they needed to go across the bottom. I thought there was already so much snow in the photos that I would punch the boots from the lighter side of the paper and mount them on a dark blue wavy-cut strip. Since a few of the bird stickers in the pack were wearing winter weather gear, I added them to the layout as well.

Happy Birthday!

Welcome back to my March 2022 trip to New York. The event that spurred the NPTC Meetup was the 200th anniversary of Harriet Tubman's birth. Born enslaved, she has no record of her birthday, but most historians agree it was in March. The NPS picked the 12th for the event, with music, speeches, and even specially decorated cookies (which were quite tasty). Most important for us at the NPTC, a special stamp was created. You can see Allan getting one of the first impressions of it in his passport!

This layout is based on a CM Advisor Instructional pamphlet from 2023. I have a pin of the front page saved here, but you can also email me if you would like a PDF copy. Since we were celebrating a birthday, I grabbed my birthday stash and looked for an appropriate collection. I chose a Fast-to-Fabulous paper pack that was originally meant to celebrate New Year's. The sketch called for 4 paper strips measuring 1 1/2". The pre-printed paper had a brown, blue, and green print measuring 1 1/2"! I just needed to find a touch of coordinating paper to make the other 2 strips, which I found in the Candlelight paper pack. I used the reverse for the right side of the layout. Because Shutterfly cuts their photos just a tad under 6" wide, I used a border sticker to cover the gap between the 3 photos and the paper. It also brought a little of the brown into the right page. A little more brown came from an old journal mat that I trimmed to 4" wide. 

The Waiting Game

Welcome back to my March 2022 trip to Harriet Tubman's birthday party. Our group clustered in the parking lot waiting for the ranger. Allan (second person on the left with his hands in the air) arranged this meetup and thought we had a ranger coming to talk to us. None of the houses were open for tours yet, though there is a small visitor center. It was also locked, though. These photos are actually from 2 trips out to the homestead (before and after the downtown Auburn center), with the same results. Lots of standing in the snow and waiting for a ranger who never appeared. But you know, when it's my NPTC friends, we can enjoy ourselves anyway!

This layout is based on a 1-2-3 from Noreen Smith. It was posted on the CM blog in 2016. The papers are from another old CM pack, and I'm not completely sure of the paper pack's name. The pack had an all-over design on one side (the circles you see as the larger sections), but the other side had a pre-printed border, making it difficult to use as a traditional 1-2-3. No worries! Just use the cutting guide with other pieces of paper and get the sizes you need. I chose to use the chevron strips for contrast here, and I think it worked out well. I thought the snowman sticker matched me because of the beanie hat with a pom-pom.

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.