The Homestead

As I mentioned in the last blog, our trail led to an old homestead. Little remained except the family cemetery. Kristen was fascinated by the little stones. It looks like many of them have been replaced with modern grave markers. Still, the markers that simply say "Mother" and "Father" can be moving in their own way. Jim helped the photo process by clearing the fallen leaves off all the stones.

This layout uses papers from CM's old " Cottage " palette. It was one of my favorite packs, especially as the stickers had a vintage feel. I started the page creation with the borders at the top. I had created those from an idea sheet CM produced simultaneously with the palette. At that time, CM used pages that were NOT true 12x12. They were 12" long but only about 11 1/2" wide. That made it a bit tricky to use with non-CM materials ("contraband") as you would have to trim all of the pages. However, CM eventually joined the standard sizing and now makes everything in true 12x12 size. But that means these papers don't fit! They are about 1/2" short. I've used multiple techniques to overcome that, including sacrificing a second piece of paper to fill the gap or only using the paper as a mat. For this layout, I trimmed the orange papers to create rectangles but intentionally left some of the white cardstock showing behind the paper and the borders. Luckily, I'm almost done using these papers, so I won't have to be so creative soon!