Summer Road Trip part 9--The Mill part of Mabry's Mill

The village at Mabry's mill contains a variety of structures. It reminded me a lot of the cluster of cabins at the Great Smoky Mountains. The mill can still function though it was not running at the time of my visit. I was impressed with the variety of machinery the water could power. When I think of a mill I generally think of grinding corn or wheat. However, this was also used to saw and inside is an impressive array of tools and jigs.

This layout is based on a sketch that I cannot find to show you. But you'll see that it's a fairly simple design. Since I had so many photos in a horizontal layout and could trim the rest to 4x4, I could run 2 layered borders through the middle. The layers include an older piece of textured fabric at the back, a middle strip of Reminisce paper, and a border maker cartridge of gears. Given the details of the photos, that was the easiest part to choose.

Another collection of historic structures included a sorghum mill (which was used to get something sweet because refined sugar was less available). I also found some wagons and plows "casually" spread around the clearing. 

This layout was made for my November class. The papers used were not CM. The white print in the middle is actually from the same tablet as the prints used in my comfort food layout last week. But the orange and green tones helped convey the rustic feel I was looking for. The embellishments were from the Homestead pack. One trick I used on this page is to take a slightly larger embellishment like a tree or large collection of leaves and cut it into multiple smaller sections. then you can use those to layer around your objects.

The last layout is of the Blacksmith Shop. There was a reenactor on duty but the forge had not been fired. Still, you can see the wide variety of items that a blacksmith had to be able to make.

I once again turned to the Homestead pack for this layout. There are scraps of a few other heritage packs as well. The sketch I based this layout on is from the CM Virtual Crop posted for a Black Friday Challenge. It wasn't posted on the blog, just on the Facebook group. The sketch has a variety of 12" strips of paper to make the background and then some borders to highlight the photos. I chose a laser-cut border for the middle and then added 2 of the barbed-wire border maker cartridge strips in black cardstock. It gave a nice contrast to the lighter papers. The title came from a mat card in the pack. (It's also my favorite TV Show!)