Inside Mill City

My next visit in Minneapolis was to the Mill City Museum. This location hosts a Mississippi NRRA stamp as it backs up to St. Anthony Lock and Dam. For a long time, this area had been THE center for flour milling in the US, partly because of the massive water power coming off the river. For that reason, I'm including a tour of the inside of the building. There is an interesting movie about the area which feels sort of like you are in an elevator and you move floor to floor. In reality, I think the dioramas and movie screens move up and down. On the main floor are some excellent exhibits about flour from harvesting to processing to baking. Love the giant box of Bisquick!

This layout is based on a CM Virtual Crop from October 2021. I used a paper pack called Baked with Love which was free to my customers if they spent $250 with me. CM now includes some sort of embellishment--either tags, stickers or die-cuts--with the free packs. They change each quarter. I made this while away at my weekend crop and it was a good thing I had these on hand as I had forgotten to bring my folder of food scrapbook items. 

This is part of the exhibit focused on the milling process. You can see one of the grinding heads on the right page as well as grain elevators. 

This layout is somewhat based on the May 2023 CM Virtual Crop sketch #4. This month CM focused on Fast-to-Fabulous pages so all 4 sketches were double-page layouts. Again, I was at the crop house so I needed to use what I brought and the best choice turned out to be papers from 2 different kits. On the left, I had previously cut a circle from the Picture Perfect travel kit (a special kit from a few years ago). I backed that with some paper scraps. On the right is a SUPER old CM page from when they first introduced the concept of pre-printed layouts. However, there was a strip of foreign clocks. So turning to the sketch, I Covered those and any gaps on the far left with 2 strips of coordinating paper (also scraps). I did twist a photo as suggested in the sketch on the left. I replaced 2 photos with larger embellishments on the right (camera die-cut and an arrow tag). Using the title die-cut completed my paper pack! Feels so good to use up stock!

The most interesting part of the tour was finding out that one problem with milling flour is that it is flammable! And there were many fires over the years. One in particular burned not only its own mill but 3 or 4 nearby ones. You can still see the scorch marks on the walls!

This is a layout I made for a class I took and I cannot show you the sketch. The left side was to be a flower so I tried to take the technique and make it look like the explosion described above (and on the layout). The small "v" looking bits are remnants of a punch (punch poop as some say) and I was trying to make it look like flour was flying through the air. I had some paper from the fireman kit so I was able to introduce flames and the fireman's helmet and badge. It's not my best work but I think it is effective in telling the story.