The Waiting Game

Welcome back to my March 2022 trip to Harriet Tubman's birthday party. Our group clustered in the parking lot waiting for the ranger. Allan (second person on the left with his hands in the air) arranged this meetup and thought we had a ranger coming to talk to us. None of the houses were open for tours yet, though there is a small visitor center. It was also locked, though. These photos are actually from 2 trips out to the homestead (before and after the downtown Auburn center), with the same results. Lots of standing in the snow and waiting for a ranger who never appeared. But you know, when it's my NPTC friends, we can enjoy ourselves anyway!

This layout is based on a 1-2-3 from Noreen Smith. It was posted on the CM blog in 2016. The papers are from another old CM pack, and I'm not completely sure of the paper pack's name. The pack had an all-over design on one side (the circles you see as the larger sections), but the other side had a pre-printed border, making it difficult to use as a traditional 1-2-3. No worries! Just use the cutting guide with other pieces of paper and get the sizes you need. I chose to use the chevron strips for contrast here, and I think it worked out well. I thought the snowman sticker matched me because of the beanie hat with a pom-pom.

The North Star

In March 2022, I traveled north to Auburn, NY, for a meetup with my NPTC friends. The Harriet Tubman National Historic Park scheduled a celebration of her 200th birthday (or nearly — no one really knows her exact date of birth). Friday, I drove up, and the weather was fine. However, Friday night, a winter storm came in, and I watched the parking lot from my hotel room as several inches of snow accumulated. Saturday morning, I cautiously headed out to our meetup location. Harriet Tubman lived in this area after she ceased her work on the Underground Railroad and spying for the Union during the Civil War. The white building is her home and has been registered as a National Historic Landmark. The ladies in the blue-and-yellow tops are from a group that holds walks to support civil rights. They held one in the area for the birthday celebration, and we found them at the homestead that morning. I was impressed that they walked in all that snow. 

This layout is based on Noreen Smith's February 2026 1-2-3+ layout. Truly. I know if you look at her demo, it's not quite the same. I flipped the left and right pages, then rotated the right page 90 degrees because I had more horizontal photos. I used a sheet of paper from a very old CM paper pack called Reflections Winter Additions. The Plus paper is a sheet of lichen cardstock that I used to make the snowflake punched borders and the photo mats. The stickers were from a different collection, but matched pretty well. The stickers in the kit didn't really match my theme. The bonus from using that particular border maker cartridge is that you get little snowflakes punched from the middle of the circles. I adhered those with a Xyron sticker maker.