No Pigs are Involved in this Post

It's Hogmanay! That's a Scottish tradition where you celebrate the incoming New Year. The Brearly House in New Jersey hosts one every year. And again, since I now live closer it was easy for me to visit. They have a bonfire (carefully controlled by the fire department) where they encourage you to write down everything you were unhappy with in the previous year and throw it in the fire to BURN! It's quite cathartic. I arranged an NPTC meetup for this event and had a great turnout! It was a very cold night and had recently snowed but we kept warm and enjoyed the event.

This layout is from one of my Paper Loft classes and uses their Euphoria paper kit. I liked the brown tones that also incorporated fun with the banners and diamond prints. I didn't pay any attention to the photo mats--I just placed my photos where I wanted them and it worked out perfectly! I do love their word cut-apart sheets. They are the perfect accents to the page.

The official picture was indoors (and I think everyone appreciated that!) You can also see the organized, polite line of people stamping. I think we were a bit loud and may have drowned out the fiddle player in the next room though. Well, it can be months between seeing each other and there's always a lot to catch up on!

This is the last page of the album so I only needed one page. I used another of the same layouts from Paper loft and again ignored those photo mats. Quick pages!

Centennial Part 16--The Old Barracks

On Wednesday I toured by myself for a bit. I stopped at the New Jersey capitol building, and while they did have a lobby dedicated to the National Park centennial, I chose to not include it in the blog. It is in the album, so if you are particularly interested, stop by to look! After the capitol building I walked around the corner to the Old Barracks. This is part of the Crossroads of the American Revolution trail. This is where the Hessian soldiers were stationed when George Washington made his famous river crossing and attack on Christmas day. I was the only person on my tour, and it took more than an hour to go through all the various rooms.

This is a pair of Fast to Fabulous pages. Once again you can see that I strayed outside of the pre-printed photo boxes. I chose these 2 because of the writing on the background. It reminded me of a letter home. I attempted to piece together photos to show the shape of the compound, but ran out of space on the page, so on the right there are 2 photos combined at the top and the remaining side is below. The title is cut from the Cricut in nice big letters. You can make the letters any size you like, which can be a real bonus to page filling.

Centennial part 4--Friday night picnic

After touring the Brearley House, we all drove over to Washington Crossing State park. Yep, the Jersey side where Washington and his troops landed for that fateful surprise attack. This state park contains another Crossroads of the American Revolution stamp and we saw the film at the visitor center, picked up the stamp and then gathered for the picnic.

The left page uses a sticker that I'd been holding onto for a LONG time. I mean, when ELSE am I going to use a Washington Crossing the Delaware sticker?!? I mounted that on a piece of blue cardstock that I tore with a rough edge ruler (this double wave tearing tool is very similar to what I used but has more rough edges). To add to the water theme I used a leftover piece from a strip where I cut out a bunch of triangles to make banners. I also had a journal box with water rushing over rocks.

For the right side, I used 1/2 of a layout kit that I made during one of my monthly trips to Enchanted Memories. Most people don't think of splitting up pages, but in this album I actually did that a couple of times. You'll see the left side of the layout in a few weeks. I just didn't want to use the left (hot dog) page with the intro being all about the Washington Crossing.

After we ate, one of the members arranged some group games and everyone had a lot of fun.

This is a layout I created at a Paper Loft class during one of the Lancaster Creating Keepsakes conventions. The classes are great because they focus on highlighting the photos, not the paper. The Fun and Games title was created through some older CM letters. The mixed colors not only worked well with the paper, but brought out the energy of the contests. This is another good example of not worrying about the photo mats already placed on the page. You can see that NOTHING fits within the original (cream) boxes. My favorite use was cropping the long photos so that they fit within 2 of the mats on the right page. Those mats become great journaling boxes. You could even layer stickers in that space. I think the paper on these pages is busy enough that stickers weren't needed though.

Centennial Part 3--The Brearley House

On Friday, we arranged a tour of the Brearley House in Lawrenceville, NJ. It is not normally open on Fridays, but they were happy to arrange 3 separate tours to accommodate all of the members who wanted to go. There are some stamps there that are hard to obtain, so this was a very popular opportunity. Although we had people sign up for the 3 different start times, few actually showed at their appointed hour. But between those showing up early for one and late for another, the tours were still the right size!

This layout was created during a virtual crop from Creative Memories. To get people ready, there was a "preview" sketch challenge on Friday night that you can see here. For once, I followed the sketch almost exactly! I chose an older piece of CM with red tones to match the brick work. Then I accented with yellow to match the other predominant color in the paper. I ended up going back after the challenge and replacing the original sticker letters (much manipulated due to shortages of the required letters) with Cricut cut ones. If anything looks slightly ripped, it's from where the original sticker letters were. But that just matches the antique feeling of the page! 😀

I took the tour with the first group so that I was prepared to help the subsequent groups along. There are a number of time-period correct antiques in the home, though not necessarily from the original family holdings. It's amazing how some parts of the house are still in great shape hundreds of years later, including the floors.

The left page uses an idea I saw to create flames. The story is about a  burning log on the wood floor. The flames are actually red and yellow paper cut with the Creative Memories Border Maker system using the grass cartridge (now discontinued). I also found a piece of paper with a design that sort of reminded me of flames, so I fussy cut 2 of them out to fill the corners. The right page was copied off an idea sheet I have in my stash (I want to say it was a page formula, but I'm not positive). I did get the idea somewhere. I just supplemented with what I had in my stash.

As the rest of the tour groups formed I could jump in and out to take photos inside and outside. Have to love the orderly line of club members waiting on their stamps!

I think I created this on my own, not a sketch or idea sheet, but I honestly can't remember (and I only created it about 18 months ago). I went fairly simple using the pale blue to match everyone's t-shirts and then contrasting with yellow (another favorite color combo). The embellishments are few but helps to create an X on the page for flow. The bear head is a VERY old paper piecing kit that I had. I just like the way he's peeking over the paper.