A Little Taste of Fall

Welcome back to the perusal of my Happy Album pages! This layout is from September 2021. The left page is a photo from our trip to Hopewell Furnace during their apple-picking event. There is a small orchard there with heritage fruit, and when the season starts, people swarm to pick the apples. You pay by the pound, but that price includes use of the bucket and the apple picker that you see in Jim's hand. You previously saw the event in this blog post.

I based this layout on the CM Happy Album Kit #9 project recipe. You can watch a video of this kit being assembled here. I actually used the kit and papers EXACTLY as they instructed. How often does that happen? I have the PDFs of the Happy Album project recipes. If you would like a copy, let me know, and I'll email it to you.

A Little Puzzling

Welcome back to the Happy Album Review! Today's page looks at the August 2021 layout (or half of it). I chose to only show the right-hand page, as this is one of the photos that was featured on a 12x12" page (see this blog post for the full layout). I am assembling a National Parks puzzle with Murphy's assistance. 

I think I used the Happy Album kit layout #17 directions, but not those specific papers. Just like the Project Recipes, you can reuse the ideas with whatever papers you have for an infinite number of uses! The kits include the small Washi-tape-looking stickers as well as banner stickers. It's meant to put the page together quickly, possibly even while traveling.

Small but Mighty

Welcome back to the blog! Before we continue with the regular 12x12 chronology pages, I thought I would take a minute to highlight my "Happy Album" or "Scrap Journal" sized pages. Part of the reason is that I haven't shared these with you before, and we have about 5 years' worth of pages to go through. The other reason is that I've taken a new job and have moved from Pennsylvania to Minnesota. As I had to pack up the scrap room, there isn't as much opportunity to prepare pages for showing!

The first set of pages I want to highlight is from July 2021. My albums feature a 2-page monthly calendar where I enter the month's highlights, followed by a 2-page layout with a few select photos of those events. In July 2021, I attended the NPTC convention in Washington, DC. Those photos are on the right side of the layout. You'll see me riding the Glen Echo Park carousel and our group photo at Belmont Paul Women's Equality National Monument.

If the photos look familiar, it's because I have already shared the 2021 convention trip. Check out this post on Belmont Paul and this one on the Glen Echo Park carousel. That's probably the best way to see the difference in size of these pages. Each Happy Album (as it was originally called) page is 6 3/4" wide x 10" long. I based this layout on a sketch I saved from the CM Blog (scroll to "traditional").

CM had originally made "kits" for the Happy Album. Each contained a few sheets of paper sized to the page, plus some stickers or other embellishments. This is Kit #2, which included the tropical pattern for the left beach page. The right is similarly colored but less "beachy". The coral cardstock mats help tie the 2 halves together.

50-States Album--Montana

The last entry for the updated 50-states album pages is about my most recent visit. As I put these photos in the album, I started to leaf through the completed pages. That's when I realized I hadn't posted the other pages! 

In early June 2026, I had a conference in Seattle. I decided it would be the perfect chance to take the Empire Builder Amtrak train to Glacier National Park, since it stops just outside the park entrance. You'll see much more about this trip in a few years when we reach that part of my chronology. For now, here are the photos of us at the entrance sign, the iconic Red Buses, and a view of the mountains from Two Medicine Lake, where we took a boat trip with other NPTC folks.

I made this page by copying an idea from the Creative Memories blog. One of the papers in the Explorer collection had a map of the 50 states. I chose to highlight Montana rather than Minnesota, and I think the combination of lakes and mountains worked perfectly for the photos I ended up using. Can you tell I mixed 2 sets of sticker letters to spell out Montana?