Another stop at WWII

It's just before Memorial Day, so a perfect time to post this visit to the WWII memorial.

Until writing this blog, I don't think I realized how many times I visited the WWII memorial. It may actually be a higher visit count than Independence! Coming off the Tidal Basin, I had to go past this area on my way to the Metro station, and so it's always nice to stop. As the sun was setting, I couldn't take many photos, but I did like the sunset view of the Lincoln Monument over the reflecting pool. Of course I had to take a photo of the Army Air Forces symbol as I remember my grandfather who served in the war in that branch of the military.

When I found this paper, I KNEW I had to use it for the WWII memorial. The wall on the other side of the reflecting pool is filled with stars representing those who died during the war. I mounted everything on black to set it off from the field of stars. The unigrid even got mounted on black cardstock. The bottom of the page is another black strip of paper with a border sticker of stars from Paper House's Washington DC cardstock stickers. Above that is a die cut of the WWII memorial from the Eastern National.

A New Monument

After leaving FDR, I headed to the newest member of the Tidal Basin--MLK. The monument is fairly straightforward, but very profound.

For this page, I wanted to do something to highlight the "moving lines" on the statue in the bottom left photo. That's why I chose striped paper and turned it to the side. With a little judicious trimming I was able to get all the components into one 12x12 page including the unigrid, a journal box and a decorative sticker (from the Eastern National scrapbook pack).

The Roosevelts

After leaving the George Mason memorial, I made my way around the Tidal Basin to the Roosevelt Memorial. Never having been there before I accidently entered at the end and viewed all the rooms backwards!

I didn't really know what to do with my lone photo of Eleanor, so I decided to give her a solo page. The background is one of the Gallivant fast-to-fabulous pages. I rooted through my Eastern National materials and found the die cut of Eleanor and the 5x7 card on the left. I suppose the card could have been a photo mat, but I thought it also worked well as a journal box. The same image of Eleanor is on the card so I thought it worked well.

OK, on to FDR. The monument is divided into rooms representing his 4 terms. Each is filled with symbolic statues and some sort of water element.

The left page is the back of the fast-to-fabulous which I really liked. To make a match on the right I found a piece of gray paper for the bottom and a red and gold remnant for a top border. The yellow mat under the photo also helps to pull the page together. The mat under the photo of me and FDR was chosen for the pale green paper which reminded me of the patina of the statues.

One of the most moving sections was the room featuring the challenges of the depression. Apologies for the blurriness of the photo, I had an issue with lighting.

For this page I used the new Archivers paper from Creative Memories as well as some older retro stickers from the early days of Creative Memories. I thought the brown tones went well with the rugged looking statues.

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.