A Tiny Bit of Olympic National Park

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! I want to thank you for following my blog and my journeys through the National Park System.

The display for Olympic National Park featured the concept of "Tiny Houses". The builders are recommending a structure like this as a visitor center to help preserve the environment. The outside of the house included local trees and plants as well as a small garden. Going through the display did bring back wonderful memories of my trip there.

This layout is based on one of my class sketches from February. I used a background from the Woodland Whimsy collection and a dark strip for the banner from the S'Mores collection. I was able to use up a bit more of my Olympic Park stickers as well as a few random nature stickers from my collection. I love these pages when they come together quickly.

Poetic License

The title this week is the only thing I can think of to explain the next exhibit. If you see the actual monument at Lincoln's Birthplace, you will see a large marble structure. Inside there IS a replica of a birth cabin. The display below in no way resembles either of those 2 entities. But they were going for rustic simplicity and I suppose they did achieve their goal.

I looked through my saved pins featuring flowers and a general "Spring" theme and found this blog post from Creative Memories. I had pulled my Full Bloom collection as one of the items I wanted to use for this album and so I was able to replicate the borders. Given the large photo (created by welding 3 separate 4x6 photos together) it seemed the perfect backdrop to the rustic garden on display. I was also able to use a few of my paper flowers in the upper right corner. It's not a design element I use often so when I get a chance to use my stash I take it!

The Devil Went Down to Jersey?

 In New Jersey, there is a National Reserve (an affiliated area, not a true national park) called the Pinelands. If you grew up in New Jersey you likely heard tales of the "Jersey Devil" -a creature that flies around the Pine Barrens creating havoc. It's their version of Sasquatch apparently. The story was told in this display but they also highlighted the various crops like berries and vegetables grown in the area.

This layout is based on a border sketch from Creative Memories. Our CM Advisor group was given the challenge to use one of the sketches from the weekend and I made this border from pumpkin and apple border maker cartridges. I used paper and stickers from the "Locally Grown" pack due to the gardening nature of the display. The pumpkins and apples are a little too close to the same shape and I didn't get the variety of colors I was looking for to make them stand out, but it's a cute border and just needed a backdrop for the photos and journaling box. 

The Unofficial State Bird

So many states claim the mosquito as the unofficial state bird that it's almost a cliche. But when you see "Mosquito Meter" crafted into the display, you know there are bound to be problems. I guess I'll need to carefully plan my visit to the real park so that it's not a war zone! You'll remember that Jim and I experienced a horde of mosquitoes during our visit to Portsmouth Island (or check out that blog post by clicking the link). I may have to do this park without him!

This layout is again from one of the classes I took. It was a fairly simple concept where you lay out the letters and a border sticker and then chop and mat them to create a crazy title. I had kept a piece of the S'More Memories pack that had dragonflies as the design. But given the photo of the Mosquito Meter, you thought mosquitoes instead, right? This layout only used one piece of paper. I cut the squares for the corners from the left-over paper after the title was done.