Hallowed Ground

I bought a ticket for a double-decker bus ride that was hop-on hop-off around the city. Being cold, I stuck to the first level! But it was an easy way to get across the river to Arlington Cemetery. Now the cemetery isn't actually part of the NPS, but there IS a park inside its boundaries that I'll show you next week. Since the Eastern National DC scrapbook kit had some die cuts and stickers though, I thought I'd show you what I created.

This layout uses a project recipe from Creative Memories. It was made for a collection called "Cool Serenity" but by switching the paper to the Brave pack, I was able to make the same cuts and use it for the Arlington layout. I had a few random photos of the highlights of the area such as the JFK eternal flame. The sticker set in the EN kit included not only a small image of the structure but also had a title so I cut out the title as well and put it on the layout. The notated die cut was part of the kit as well and just about matched my photo! The stickers in the bottom right corner were part of an older CM sticker sheet that had patriotic and July 4th. I liked the way that the banner and stars resembled the windows of service families in WWII.

I walked up the hill toward Arlington House (next week's topic) and just in front of the house is the grave of Pierre Charles L'Enfant--the man who designed the capitol city. His grave fittingly looks over his creation and you can see from the photos that you can easily see the tidal basin and more! I wanted this layout to do justice to his vision.

This layout is a compilation of multiple scrapbook companies. Let's start with the background. Those are two 8 1/2 x 11 pages from the EN Washington DC kit. When put together at the middle of 12 x 12 album pages it leaves the edges for decoration. The paper is a map of the city as designed (or shortly after Virginia took back its land from DC). To echo the design of the paper, I bought a die cut from Paper Wizard and while I don't see this particular one for sale, they have some great items for national parks. I used some leftover 8 1/2 x 11 patriotic paper to mat the photos and the journal box is sitting on a photo mat from the kit I used to make the Ford's Theatre pages.  I think Pierre would love it!