Not music you can dance to

Welcome back to my tour of the Springfield Armory from December 2021. One of the highlights of the visitor center is this large rack of muskets, called the Rifle Organ, created in the 1840s. It's meant to be storage, though it was created specifically to impress (the original order was for 36 of these cubes — arranged in one room, it would certainly be a sight). The poet Longfellow and his wife visited, and his wife compared the long barrels to those on an organ in a church, and the moniker stuck. It impressed them in the wrong way as she declared it a "death organ". Nonetheless, that's where we decided to collect for our group photo for the meetup. One other interesting photo is tacked on here on the left. If you zoom in, you can see some of the spectacular fails of guns that exploded either during construction and testing or, unfortunately, during use by a soldier.

I created this layout during Noreen Smith's Scrap Your Stash virtual crop weekend at the end of April. She created 8 sketches for us and encouraged us to use our hoarded supplies. For this one, the goal was to use up collections that had just strips of paper left. I chose the CM Legacy of Love collection, and yes, it's getting low on paper! I felt the banners on the left needed something to "seal" the edge, so I added a thin laser-cut border to the top.