A New Hope

My last park of the day was also a new park for me. Hopewell Culture (not to be confused with Hopewell Furnace) is a site that preserves ancient Native American burial mounds. It's similar to my visit to Effigy Mounds but with fewer trees around, the mounds are much easier to identify. Even if they do still just look like grass-covered mounds. I started at the visitor center to watch the movie (as I had missed this at Effigy Mounds I really wanted to understand the site). Afterward, I had plenty of time to view the mounds. There are 6 local sites. I chose to only do the Mounds Group near the visitor center. If I return I'll have plenty more new mounds to look at.

This is another layout I made on National Scrapbook Day. Scroll to Sketch #1 to see the layout design. I looked through my Spring paper stash and found a pack called "Ladybugs" (a promotional kit from 2023). I liked the brown paper with the swirled design as it reminded me of the interior diagrams of the mounds. The newest packs of CM paper all have coordinating cardstock colors on the front page, but that started AFTER this had been released. As it wasn't a standard pack, there wasn't a "postcard" available (one of the CM Advisors had created a cheat sheet for us for all the paper packs so we could offer cardstock to our customers). However, I found a post about making borders and cards with this pack, giving me references to cardstock that would coordinate. That's how I ended up with Kelly Green for the base! The kit had no embellishments, so I used one scrap of paper to create the border on the left. I used some VERY old CM Shortcuts for the border across the middle. Both had images that reminded me of "mounds". Because I used Kelly Green cardstock, I realized that the Kelly Green tonal pack would also work, so I used some of the stickers that matched the tonal pack and a matching journal box.