Generally speaking...

If you've been to Gettysburg you probably noticed that the visitor center also serves as the starting point for the Eisenhower National Historic Site. In October, 2007 Jim and I made a visit during my fall break. It was nice traveling on a Monday because there were no crowds to deal with. We did take time to walk through the museum at the visitor center (I have NEVER seen so many Civil War rifles in one cabinet before or since!) But the focus was really to visit a new park and to see the Eisenhower Farm.

This layout was made during my first "Virtual Crop" with Creative Memories. Using a Facebook page and their blog, Creative Memories would post a "challenge" and while working at home on my own I would create a page that fit the challenge and then upload a photo to their site.

The challenge was to copy one of their Design Team layouts. The company has changed websites and the original is gone, but a similar layout can be seen here: Click here to see the inspiration. To be thrifty I saved those punched out bits and used them to mount the title letters. I've said before that after a few uses, a sheet of sticker letters gets difficult to use because you are missing key letters. On this page I tried to use a salvage technique where I cut out around the outline of the remaining image on the sheet, mounted it on similar colored cardstock and then "fussy cut" around the letter before mounting it on the stamp. It was successful but I don't like the look of the residual white bits it generates.

The bottom right corner features a memorabilia pocket. Similar to the large ones I love for the brochures, this medium size one holds the ticket stub for our bus trip and tour. If you have an item that you are worried about putting in contact with your scrapbook pages, the pocket helps mitigate any acid that may leach to surrounding paper and photos.

I really enjoyed the house tour but didn't feel like we had enough time to see the grounds. The bus returns periodically and you are supposed to return on the next run but you would have to choose a later bus if you wanted to see more of the farm and the visitor center.

I used a multi-square block technique on the left page. I took a pack of 7"x7" paper I owned and cut an inch from two sides to create 6" squares. The 4 squares were mounted next to each other to create a background. Because my cuts weren't perfect there was a gap in the middle which I covered with a circle punch. It sort of looks like a sofa cushion button and I thought it worked well.  The other technique I like on this page is the journaling. I used a strip of plain cardstock, wrote out the journaling, and then cut it into strips and mounted it.

Again, being thrifty (and after all it IS called SCRAPbooking), I took one of the page remnants from the 7" papers to create the mounting square on the right page for the stickers and under one of the photos. Because of the memorabilia (house guide) taking up so much room on the page there wasn't room for much embellishment, but the stickers help revive that 50s-60s era feel.