Along the Outer Banks

In August 2015 I started driving to the annual vacation spot in North Carolina. For this trip, I hugged the coast a bit more stopping in Manteo to see Fort Raleigh as well as refreshing my stamps at a couple of other nearby parks such as Cape Hatteras and Wright Brothers National Memorial. My Wright Brothers stop was so brief, all I got was a brochure and the stamps. I love the long drive by myself though I appear in fewer photos. The weather was great and I learned a lot on the trip.

This page commemorates my stops at 3 different parks. The borders were copied from this Pinterest item. It uses the Cool Serenity papers that I had handy from my White Sands pages. I intentionally made the wave borders going in opposite directions. I think it adds visual interest that way. The middle of the page uses some stickers I had purchased in the Atlantic Beach area years ago. The large square cut in half brings the 2 sides together. The stickers luckily had the same tones as the CM paper and stickers so you don't really notice they are from 2 packs. After I photographed this layout I realized that I had printed the lighthouse in 2 sizes so I switched to a 5x7 photo with less mat showing. 

My stop was designed to pick up a new park: Fort Raleigh. Not only did I get to see the park sites but I stayed for their outdoor performance of the Lost Colony (including a back-stage tour!). I recommend seeing that play if you have time and are in the area. The visitor center has a lot of great dioramas and interactive displays as well. A nice day-long visit.

My next layout is based off a layout I saved from the original Creative Memories blog. You can see it on my Pinterest page here. I turned the page 90-degrees to accommodate my horizontal photos. I dug out my corner rounder for this layout as well. I used to use that on every photo originally but now it's just for special occasions. I used up some of the old CM Cottage paper and stickers for this one. Using patterned paper for some blocks meant that I didn't need a ton of photos. I also used them as journaling boxes and a place for title stickers. 

Two lighthouses

After returning from Mosquito Island we were headed back to our cottage. Since we were passing Cape Hatteras light, we stopped to take a few photos. The visitor center was closed but we could still walk around the structures. The next morning we revised our route to the Corrigan's Condo and so I requested a stop at Bodie Island Lighthouse as well.

These 2 pages are from Forevermore Scrapbooks in Gettysburg. They have a wide array of National Park photo pages. They actually are each to have another page so that they make 2-page layouts with the 2nd page being a photo of the lighthouse. I find that sort of redundant, so I just buy the page with the park sign on it. And it worked perfectly here as wallpaper for my lighthouse photos. All I needed to do was mat the photos and journal and--voila!

Ocracoke Island

In September, Jim and I made our annual trip to the beach to stay with his family. We started a few days early to work our way to North Carolina. Our first stop was the Outer Banks area. I wanted to go to an offshoot of Cape Lookout called Portsmouth Island and the only way to get there is to take a ferry from Ocracoke. Ironically, Ocracoke is part of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, not Cape Lookout.

For this page, I used a layout I made at the Lancaster Creating Keepsakes Convention through Petticoat Parlor (Link). The class was held to help us learn to use gelato paint on thin wood as die cuts for our pages (palm tree and 2 shells in bottom corner). I have to admit, I do not like the wood die cuts. Even though they are thin, they are too thick for my taste. (Not crazy about the string or anchor at the top either). However, I took the class and paid for all of it, so I left the page "as-is". This is actually 1/2 of the layout I made. I used the other half for a non-NPS page.

Traversing the Outer Banks

After leaving Atlantic Beach with Jim's family we planned an extended return by heading to the Outer Banks a little further north. We dropped off Jim's niece just north of Hatteras and headed up the island stopping at Bodie Lighthouse which was under renovation. Since there wasn't much to see there we headed north to Wright Brothers National Memorial.

The left page just has 2 borders as decoration. The borders were made by punching light and dark blue waves with the Creative Memories border maker system. The sand bars come from one rectangular piece of beige paper which I tore diagonally. The stickers are from Creative Memories as well. I scraplifted the idea from a pinterest pin (Dawn Dimock's idea). I think she intended that they border 2 pages for a double layout, but I sort of liked the way they stacked. There is just the one photo of the lighthouse and a unigrid so it helped fill the page nicely. The journaling box is decorated with some remnant seagull stickers I had.

The right page is a pre-made layout. At one point Creative Memories had some pre-designed pages for what they called picfolio albums. Instead of the strap pages they were pre-bound in an album. Unfortunately it wasn't expandable. I did use the album to make a gift but used my own pages as the theme was a bit more tropical. So when I got to these pages, I found the stash and decided the pale blue and beige really looked good with the historic theme and the beach location.

Once we got to Wright Brothers we attended a ranger talk in the visitor center near the replica Wright flyer. This was a great overview to the park. Afterward we walked the grounds and toured the museum.

In the layout above, the left page is a simple wallpaper technique. Beginning with the right side I started using some pre-designed pages that Creative Memories calls "Fast to Fabulous". I bought them because they were on sale. I didn't really think I'd like them but I have to admit--with very little effort a layout comes together QUICKLY. The bottom right rectangle is a pre-designed space. Since I didn't have a photo for that space I looked around for something else to fill in. I found a deck of cards with inspirational sayings that I had won at a crop and thought "Dare to Fly" was quite appropriate for the page! I slipped it onto the page and it was done in a jiffy.

The F2F pages are printed on both sides. One nice thing about that is that you don't have the bulkiness of many layers of card stock on your page. The left page had room for 4 photos. I took one of the pre-arranged photo boxes and added a very large sticker that I had of the Wright Flyer. On these two pages there are just 3 embellishments--the plane sticker, a sun sticker and the word "Fly" that I cut from a sheet of paper travel words. Everything else is F2F,  and a journal box and photo mats made to align with the theme/colors. I didn't even have to trim the photos this time.

If you've tried Fast to Fabulous, let me know your thoughts! Comment below.