50-states album--Kansas

Welcome back to the blog. We are continuing with my 50-state album pages that you haven't seen yet. This week I'm showing you the Kansas page. I'm not sure how I managed to present all the photos from my visit to Kansas in May 2021 without showing this page, but I did! If you want to see the rest of the visit, click on the Nicodemus or Fort Larned links at the bottom of the post.

This layout is based on another pin I saved from Scrapbook.com. I had the wheat and sunflower papers in my stash, so it was quite easy to put the layout together. The grain elevator sticker is from a Canadian sticker pack from Old CM, but it gave me the red barn feel, so I added it. I'm not sure where the small red-and-white flowers came from, but they might have been on the same sticker page. The state flower for Kansas is the sunflower, and the bottom paper covers that pretty well.

50-states Album--Arkansas

Before we continue with my chronological National Park visits, I wanted to spend a few weeks revisiting some of the pages in my 50-States album. I added photos over the last year for most of these, but I forgot to show you what I made. The first page is Arkansas. I visited this state for the first time in July 2025, when Hot Springs National Park hosted the NPTC convention. In addition to the park photo, I included a shot of the state sign that I saw crossing a bridge into the state. Don't tell my mother that I took that while driving 😊. The final photo is of the state Capitol building. 

You'll remember that I created the pages for this album several years ago. It's nice to complete a page quickly by adding the photos. It literally takes minutes to finish a page! I based this page on a pin I saved from the Scrapbook.com gallery. You can see the original here. I created the flowers and the Arkansas flag on the Cricut. The flag was surprisingly easy to create, even with some tiny letters and stars. The small branches above are supposed to be the Arkansas state flower (Apple Blossoms). I think they look a little more like cherry blossoms, but the end result worked!

Fine Dining

Welcome back to the Seward House in upstate New York. Our last stop in the house was the dining room. I LOVE the lavish dining sets. Painted plates with a variety of patterns, ivory-handled servingware, and that gorgeous silver candelabra. What's most interesting about the table is the small vial you see on the right side of the layout. Supposedly, it has a few grains of tea that were taken from the Boston Tea Party. Now, having attended the reenactment of that event, I saw a lot of discussion about how it was frowned upon and that people were severely punished for attempting to remove any tea by secreting it on their persons. From a legal point of view, it would have also been a problem. Technically, anything that came ashore would have had to have been taxed. 

This layout is based on Sketch #4 from the CM Virtual Crop in June 2026. Instead of choosing a collection for the papers, I turned to Creative Memories' new supplement called Molten Lava paper. One side of each of these papers has an almost mirror-like quality, but with a subtle overall pattern. I used both gold and silver Molten Lava for the large squares. The base pages are dark blue shimmer cardstock (though the paper is so light I hesitate to call it cardstock). The small border elements are made with the gold molten lava paper and white shimmer paper. I thought those tones would match the elegance of the dinnerware, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. For embellishments, I found a few remaining stickers from a Blue and Gold collection from many years ago. The title "Timeless Treasures" seemed appropriate. I chose to remove the letters from the hexagonal border and cut the strip to add a bit more interest to the open areas of each page. Another border was placed along the bottom of the layout's left side. I found a simple journal card that seemed to fit the theme as well.