Who is David Wills?

After lunch, I decided to add a visit to the David Wills House. I knew it was part of the park but never the significance. This is the house that Lincoln stayed at the night before giving his Gettysburg Address. David Wills was instrumental in getting the National Cemetery established and then played host when Lincoln came to do the dedication. His house is on the square in Gettysburg.

I based this page on a CM Virtual Crop sketch. When I looked at the sketch I realized that one of the Fast-to-Fabulous pages that matched the one I used for the Eisenhower page was quite similar to the sketch. Instead of banners, it was white pine branches! I added a piece of white snow paper to the middle of the page so that the bricks wouldn't get lost in the red of the page. (Making it just wide enough to hold the unigrid). Since the ticket was too close in color to the white paper I mounted it on one of the tags from the embellishment pack. The left border is a laser-cut border from the Seasons Greetings line.

The downstairs rooms describe the Wills family and their daily life. Also included are period pieces salvaged from the battlefield such as the medical kit. In some ways, the rooms were stark as a lot of the details were on glass panels around the edges of the room. The NPS site has an excellent virtual tour on the website. If you've not been there in person, it's a great way to explore the site.

I decided to keep going with the F2F pages. The corner stripes were pre-printed. I added 2 laser cut borders to finish framing the page. I added a couple of embellishments from my Paper House pack of vintage die cuts. The top hat, the carriage, and the family walking (near the journal box) are all from that pad. Since the pages were a little light I used the decorative mats behind many of the photos to add some more depth.

The main attraction is of course the Lincoln Bedroom (the one in Gettysburg, not the one in the White House). They claim this is the original bed though most of the other items are just similar to how they would have looked during his stay. This is the room where he finished the speech that I would memorize in elementary school.

This layout is the end of the album and it worked out that there were just a few photos of the house left. I merged the 2 together so that there was a panorama view of the bed. It's a fairly simple layout with just a wallpaper background (some old Reminisce paper that rather matches the carpet) and white mats under the photos to keep them from getting lost. I added 2 corners to the journal box. These are die cuts from a very old CM Heritage kit. 

Inside Gettysburg

For our anniversary in 2011 Jim and I planned a trip to Gettysburg. They had recently renovated the visitor center, park film, and the Cyclorama painting. We spent quite a bit of time indoors seeing everything there was, then went for lunch. After lunch we had planned on taking a Segway tour of the battlefield for something "new". We did get to practice on them indoors but just as it was time to start the tour a thunderstorm rolled in and it had to be cancelled.

This is a layout idea I obtained at a local scrapbook store. In fact, if you are in Gettysburg, check out Forevermore Scrapbook (click here). The paper was purchased there as well, and they have a good supply of various national park themed papers. The layout is one piece of 12x12 paper which is cut at 6". Each half is then mounted on the middle of the page with the remaining mementos surrounding the paper. Because the paper is essentially a giant photo it sets the scene for the story. I didn't end up with many useable photos because I wasn't allowed to photograph the Cyclorama and we didn't get out to the battlefield. But with postcards, brochures and tickets, the day was captured thoroughly.

Generally speaking...

If you've been to Gettysburg you probably noticed that the visitor center also serves as the starting point for the Eisenhower National Historic Site. In October, 2007 Jim and I made a visit during my fall break. It was nice traveling on a Monday because there were no crowds to deal with. We did take time to walk through the museum at the visitor center (I have NEVER seen so many Civil War rifles in one cabinet before or since!) But the focus was really to visit a new park and to see the Eisenhower Farm.

This layout was made during my first "Virtual Crop" with Creative Memories. Using a Facebook page and their blog, Creative Memories would post a "challenge" and while working at home on my own I would create a page that fit the challenge and then upload a photo to their site.

The challenge was to copy one of their Design Team layouts. The company has changed websites and the original is gone, but a similar layout can be seen here: Click here to see the inspiration. To be thrifty I saved those punched out bits and used them to mount the title letters. I've said before that after a few uses, a sheet of sticker letters gets difficult to use because you are missing key letters. On this page I tried to use a salvage technique where I cut out around the outline of the remaining image on the sheet, mounted it on similar colored cardstock and then "fussy cut" around the letter before mounting it on the stamp. It was successful but I don't like the look of the residual white bits it generates.

The bottom right corner features a memorabilia pocket. Similar to the large ones I love for the brochures, this medium size one holds the ticket stub for our bus trip and tour. If you have an item that you are worried about putting in contact with your scrapbook pages, the pocket helps mitigate any acid that may leach to surrounding paper and photos.

I really enjoyed the house tour but didn't feel like we had enough time to see the grounds. The bus returns periodically and you are supposed to return on the next run but you would have to choose a later bus if you wanted to see more of the farm and the visitor center.

I used a multi-square block technique on the left page. I took a pack of 7"x7" paper I owned and cut an inch from two sides to create 6" squares. The 4 squares were mounted next to each other to create a background. Because my cuts weren't perfect there was a gap in the middle which I covered with a circle punch. It sort of looks like a sofa cushion button and I thought it worked well.  The other technique I like on this page is the journaling. I used a strip of plain cardstock, wrote out the journaling, and then cut it into strips and mounted it.

Again, being thrifty (and after all it IS called SCRAPbooking), I took one of the page remnants from the 7" papers to create the mounting square on the right page for the stickers and under one of the photos. Because of the memorabilia (house guide) taking up so much room on the page there wasn't room for much embellishment, but the stickers help revive that 50s-60s era feel.

A couple of "firsts"

I have researched my scrapbooks and my first page of a National Park visit is this 2-page layout to Gettysburg in 1988. My Uncle Larry and his family came to visit from Texas, and we took a family trip. This is not my first ever visit to a national park--I know that my family took a trip to DC in 1976, but I don't seem to have any photos of that trip.

What I like about this layout is the fence I created out of paper strips. I also like the ivy letters (and I think I still have a few to use). I do wish that I had been better at placing the letters in a straight line though. Like many layouts from this era (and I'm guessing I created this around 2000-2002) there is a lot of white on the page. I think I could have put a little more paper behind the photos. But overall the composition is pleasing.

A couple of pages later, I found this layout from a trip to DC (which I am including here in order to tie in my first visit to any national park). My brother and I went specifically to see something at the art museum though I don't remember what. We also walked over to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and I remember buying a poster of the wall. We parked outside the city and rode the Red Line from Shady Grove. I still remember the sound of the conductor reciting "This is the Red Line to Shady Grove" on the way back to the car. I wish I could record that sound here--probably the one drawback to scrapbooking.

The technique I used here is called "Between the Lines". I created a double border with design lines top and bottom and then filled the middle with small decorative stickers. The title sticker worked well for this technique and then I matched the stars and stripes along the bottom. This may be the first use of the footprint path, but definitely will not be the last.

Overall I like this page though again I think I could have used more paper under the photos.

So that's my first entry. Stay tuned to see how my scrapbooking progresses!