Believe it or not: I visited without stamping!

 In April 2017, I traveled to Iowa for one of my HPN conferences. I arrived early enough to do a park visit before the conference. Unfortunately, I got to Effigy Mounds too late to enter the visitor center. It was still light out, and the trails are open until dusk so I did a self-guided tour of the park. I think I will have to go back, not just because I need a stamp but because all I saw were some bumps in the ground. I get that these are burial mounds and are supposed to have the appearance of certain animals, but I just wasn't seeing it.

This layout had been in my stash for a while. I made this at one of the Lancaster scrapbook conventions. The class was focused on painting thin wooden pieces with gelato crayons and then heating them. The fawn and the bear prints were made using that technique. I made the pages as I paid for the class but I didn't really care for the product. I also don't typically put metal on my pages. This one included the compass spinner. Again, I paid for the class so I included it. I was able to mount the unigrid between the pawprints and compass but just barely!

My hike took me along a well-marked path and had an overlook of the Mississippi River. I took photographs of the signs to help explain what it is I was looking at. They tell a better story than my photos do of the mound orientations. The weather was a bit chilly so I spent an hour or so here and then headed back to my car to go to the conference.

This layout is based on a Meggan and Tessa Power Hour class (July 2021). They offer a free monthly class where you make 2 layouts in an hour. This particular layout was perfect for all my horizontal photos. I essentially had 12 blocks to fit a 4x6 item. Seven of those are photos, one is journaling and the rest are strips of paper cut to particular widths and rearranged to create the filler. Using several sheets of double-sided paper allowed me to get a variety of designs that could be mixed and matched across the pages. A few clusters of stickers finished off the page. The papers are from the CM Woodland Whimsy collection. (I have 3 packs of paper--boy, girl, and a re-released mixed pack; the papers are a combination of all 3). Stickers were mostly random leftovers from my stash