Centennial Part 5--The Convention

On Saturday we held our convention. Most of my morning was spent setting up the venue with our new banners and getting things out of the cars. We held the meeting at the Arch Street Quaker Meeting House which is an historic venue. Translate that to "no air conditioning". It was a hot day and we only had fans to cool ourselves, but it was still a great meeting.

Above shows that I inserted a portrait sleeve to add the Convention Stamp Pad. We're using this as our program now, and you'll see below why it didn't fit on the page. That is mounted on the black cardstock that comes with the sleeve which left the back available for more photos and memorabilia.

When you work with dark colored paper you have 2 choices for journaling--you can either use a separate block of paper, or you can write directly on the page with a gel marker. I recommend either white or silver though gold works well too if you are writing about a special event.

For the 2-page layout below, I was playing along with the Creative Memories Virtual Crop (Here is the challenge blog page.) They wanted to focus on photos and challenged us to use more than 12 photos on a 2-page layout. This is what that might look like! (It's actually 14 photos!)

The first thing to do when trying to put multiple photos on a page, is to start cropping! When you look at a photo you'll notice that there is probably a bit of extraneous stuff along the edges--ceilings, too much sky or grass, or even people you aren't focusing on.  Feel free to trim them off! (May I suggest the CM personal trimmer?) I also cropped a photo of a plate of cookies into a circle. It keeps the shape of the item and reduces the size of the photo. You'll notice I didn't mat any photos. If you review the blog page, that certainly isn't required but a lot of it depends on how small you make your photos. I layered photos which also helped place more photos on the paper. If you've cropped the edges but you have subjects of unequal height (like the middle photo on the left), you can probably cover that area of the photo with another.

If you are planning on putting multiple photos on a page, you can also print your photos smaller which decreases your need to crop. Whatever you do, leave some room for journaling. The mass of photos won't make much sense if you don't tell who is in the photo or why it was important to you! And don't forget that now you can use the Creative Memories Peekaboo sleeves which are an easy way to add photos on top of the photos on your page.

After the meeting ended, the president's dinner began at the Dave and Buster's nearby. We celebrated not only the 100th birthday of the National Park Service, but the 80th birthday of one of our members!

This layout is another example of splitting a kit. The left page is one of a set of 2 I purchased as a premade layout. I have no Idea what the "Q" was supposed to represent, but I left it on the page as decoration! There were just a few photos of the participants and I was able to layer them to show most of the room. On the right is a 1-page layout I made at one of the scrapbook conventions. It demonstrated the use of Washi tape. The candles are all made of colored washi tape with gems for candle flames (Yeah, I don't like using gems but hey, I paid for the class so I'm going to use the page). The middle of the page is a 10" square which has a border of the Washi tape. The flower was also made by folding tape on itself and layering to create a flower shape. The center is another gemstone which hides some of the folding.

Lastly, after dinner we got to spend some time in the arcade. Jim and I each have our own preferences for games. He is more shoot-em-up and I go for arcade games like skee ball or video dancing.

This was a fairly simple layout. I have 1 photo mat and a corner triangle to pull in the blue to the page (also used blue pen for journaling). The lower left corner are just a handful of small bits cut from various papers I have on hand. Did I mention it's "SCRAP" booking? ☺