On a Mission part 3: Mission Concepcion

We've reached 200 blog entries today! I hope you are enjoying these entries as much as I do. 

My last mission to visit was Mission Concepcion which has a bit of a different shape to its buildings. There is a lot of ground left but not much else.

For this layout, I cut a piece of paper in half and used it to wallpaper the left side of the page. This is because the paper is actually for Arizona and I had to cut away that portion. 😀 I matted the photos with some vibrant orange to give a little life to the page (as much as I like that paper, it's a little drab--and so are the stones of the actual church).

On a Mission part 2--San Jose

I next drove to the San Jose Mission which is the main visitor center for the parks. This is also the largest and best-preserved site of all the missions. In hindsight, I should have started here because the rangers would have been able to tell me about the staffing times at the other missions. While here I took a ranger walk with a group of random visitors. You can do a self-guided tour, and some of the families who chose to do that were reprimanded by our ranger for not being respectful of the grounds (the children, with the apparent consent of the parents, were climbing out of the window openings in the housing section.) So please--if you visit any of our great National Park units, treat them as if they were your own house.

The first pair of layouts started with the right page (as so many of mine do). This is one of the fast-to-fabulous pages. I've found that orange and brown tones work well with the southwest architecture and so I chose to incorporate this page. It helped that my pictures were oriented correctly as these older pages have mats built-in for photos. I trimmed one photo down to 4x4 and used the rest of the mat space as a journaling box. To make the left page match, I chose some scraps of orange and yellow paper to mat photos and the unigrid. I also used the yellow paper and the Medallion border maker cartridge to make the corner border.

Our tour took us through the various parts of the compound which included the church but also the daily life areas such as homes, baking ovens, and the gates of the compound. The interior photo of the church is actually a post card. I rarely photograph inside active churches.

The left page above is the reverse of the F2F from the first layouts shown. I simply had to lay the photos in place and the page was done. On the right, I chose to stack the 3 remaining horizontal photos. That left a 6x12 spot on the right of the page which I filled with scrap orange paper. The journal box matches the F2F front-side page and I found a coordinating mat to frame the last vertical photo.

On a Mission part 1--Espada and San Juan

While in San Antonio, I wanted to visit all of the missions. Jim had no interest so I set off in the morning and drove to the most southern of the missions--Mission Espada. I was earlier than the park opened so I had a chance to look around the outside. I waited for the posted hours for the visitor center to open, but no one arrived so I chose to drive over to the aqueduct that was nearby. Based on the same principles the Romans used, this aqueduct carried water to the settlement--water was important for the survival of the area. 

The layout is based on a sketch from my year-long scrapbook class (so I can't share it). It was actually a single page sketch, and I doubled it. I liked the way the triangles met and formed a shape reminiscent of the front of the missions. The paper is a mixture of an orange print and a piece from the Memoirs and Memories pack that was a little industrial. But the colors matched the color of the mission walls so you can't really see the gears and rivets until you look closely. I added a few stickers from a very old Yellow Design Lines packet. The squares sort of resemble a cross.

Below, you can see the aqueduct up close as well as the next visit I made--Mission San Juan. This site is unmanned so I gave myself a tour by reading all the signs and then moved on. More missions next week!

The left page is another sketch from our April class (so again, I can't show you). I used one block to have a journaling square rather than another photo. I had to manufacture some letters, but I thought the "Agua" title turned out well. 

On the right, I didn't use any inspiration. I had pulled paper packs with oranges and yellows when I started on the mission pages knowing those work well with Southwestern theme pages. I had one ombre yellow page which I turned sideways and then added the sun borders (CM Border Maker Cartridge). The middle sticker is the Alamo, but without the title, it rather looks like a church so I thought it decorated the page nicely. To pull a little more yellow into the middle, I added the Yellow Rose of Texas.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.....

We next drove to the LBJ ranch which is still a working ranch. We did the auto loop through the ranch and THEN found out there is an entrance fee to pay at the Ranger Station. We didn't know our timing so we didn't pre-purchase tours of the house. I think I'd like to do that if we ever get back. We did get to see the animals as well as his Air Force One plane. At the Ranger Station we discovered that this park abuts a state park dedicated to preserving farm life of the early 20th century (before electricity and running water). If you have an extra hour or two you should explore it!

I debated showing this as 2 individual pages but decided that it was just as easy to talk about the differences in one paragraph. The left paper is a simple wallpaper. When I realized I had cow photo paper, I HAD to use it. The windmill is a VERY old CM die-cut. 

The right page is a sketch from one of my classes, so I cannot show you the base. I struggled to put the map of the ranch on this page. Look closely--do you see it? Nope. I finally realized it added nothing to the story so I left it out. I do have some military stickers and had an Air Force title sticker. I thought adding the giant "1" sticker as well as that blue plane die-cut put the whole layout in context.