The Thomas Stone Affair

My next trip was in September 2017. I was heading to North Carolina for a family wedding and of course, took 2 days to reach there so I could visit a few parks along the way. This was a new park for me and one that I was very unfamiliar with. This house is a memorial to one of the Maryland signers of the Declaration of Independence. The visitor center is easy enough to find. But it's daunting to realize that you must walk through that field to get to the house. It's worth it though.

This layout is based on a sketch from Creative Memories. They posted three options and you will see 2 of them in this blog post. The first is actually the third option if you look at this page from the blog. I wanted to use up my Reminisce line from Old CM and while I did use quite a bit, I still have a few items left! The focus of this layout is the border across the bottom (you'll see that I doubled the sketch). I used a Noreen Smith technique for "crazy squares" to get the shapes I wanted. Just a few stickers finished the layout.

I took one of the Ranger-guided tours of the house. I've seen many historic homes so I know about older structures. They did focus quite a bit on Thomas Stone's legal work and who would have visited them at Habadaventure (the name of the house). Some of the original pieces are on display at the Maryland Museum of History and so his house has to make do with reproductions.

These are 2 different layouts that are next to each other in the album. I based the color scheme on the wallpaper and the bedding fabrics. The left page is based on an Even More sketch. I chose an Aqua Combo pack for the layout. All of the papers coordinate and you can see that I was able to mix 5 different sheets for this layout (plus a touch of cardstock). The stickers are older CM and I think are supposed to be Easter stickers. But they have a nice vintage look to them. The right page is the second of the bonus sketches from CM (see link above). The top shapes were a little tedious to cut but worth it for the effect. I used the contents of one of our secret boxes called "Gemtones". The papers and embellishments worked perfectly for the layout. You'll see for both pages that I welded several photos together to get a single continuous room photo.

On my way back to the visitor center, I stopped at the family graveyard. The wrought iron is nice. The graves have all been updated with new plaques so not as interesting to me from a historical point of view. 

This layout is based on a sketch I saved. I was using up some of my Fast-to-Fabulous pages in the Secret Garden line. I also have some of the coordinating paper so I used those to layer on the background. Because the background is so light, the watercolor circle isn't as noticeable. But that's OK as it doesn't detract from the photos. I found a few flowers in my stash that matched the tone of the papers to create some clusters around the pages.