The day after the NPTC convention Jim and I walked the Freedom Trail--a 2 1/2 mile path of history through downtown Boston. It was a good walk and we saw LOTS of great historical buildings. We had to take shelter at one point from a thunderstorm but otherwise had no difficulty getting around. Dedicate an entire day to the event if you attempt it and plan a place for lunch along the route.
Here is my kick-off page for the park. Notice the return of the walking feet! I told you they would be back. I purchased a sheet of stickers from Paper Source that had stickers specifically for Boston and the right border is their sticker of the beginning of the trail. You can see that I also photographed one of the markers. They get a little harder to find as you travel through the city.
The left page of the layout is Boston Commons, the 54th Regiment Memorial (we loved the movie Glory). Not sure if you can see that Colonel Shaw's sword was broken off. That seems to happen frequently. The left border is a design I copied from Creative Memories. The stars page is torn using their tearing tool and then layered on striped paper. Gives a good sense of patriotism. On the right is a burial ground with some very famous people buried in it. In trying to use up the sticker letters, I chose only a B and G sticker then hand wrote the remainder of the word. A good use for random leftover letters! The bottom border on the right is from the Creative Memories Border Maker System. I punched the fence in black to emulate the wrought iron around the burial ground and to give a sense of death for the page. But to keep the patriotic elements, I have a couple more embellishments in the stars and stripes motif.
Our next stops were at the Old South Meeting House and Faneuil Hall. I hadn't mastered indoor photos at this point so the lovely interior of the Meeting House is actually one that I found online and printed on my home printer. The building exteriors also gave me a challenge and so I had to build them with multiple images.
I created the left border with a Creative Memories short cuts strip adding the punched stars and a small title strip from the Boston sticker pack. Just a simple mat on the very white interior photo and a couple other embellishments finish the page. On the right I feature the photo I made Jim take of me getting a stamp. The stripes on my shirt are echoed in the striped banner on the bottom. The paper and banners came from a new patriotic themed paper pad that Creative Memories produced. There are 2 pages of die cuts to add to the papers.
Further along the trail is the Paul Revere House and the Old North Church. I thought it was perfect to scrapbook them together. For the left border I used the shortcuts that framed the border from the previous layout! I loved how on the bottom it mimics rolling hills so all I needed was a sticker of Paul Revere on his midnight ride. The right border was an old sticker of a brick pathway. Putting the Revere statue sticker at the end reflected our progress along the trail.
My final pages are the Navy Yard and Bunker Hill. We were getting tired so I admit we didn't actually step foot on the Constitution. The sailor was controlling the flow of people onto the ship and I liked his costume. The photo of the ship is also one that I downloaded from the internet as I didn't get a good shot of my own. Interestingly, that photo is much more clear when I photograph the layout than in person. I think it turned out rather dark.
The journal box on the left is from a scrapbook calendar I got for Christmas. It is actually the center of a photo mat. On the right I chose a mat for the Bunker Hill Monument that had fireworks. I thought that would symbolize the finale pretty well. The border is part of a pack I bought that has different colored backgrounds and small white stars printed in white. Matches my blue nautical paper on the left fairly well.
