Is there a Field of Springs?

Hello and welcome to the kick-off of my December 2021 trip to Springfield, Massachusetts. Yes, December 2021 was a big travel month for me. One of the NPTC club members grew up near Boston and planned a trip home over the holidays. She decided to hold a club meetup at Springfield Armory. It was a site I hadn't been to previously, and I found that I could easily take the Amtrak Train to the city and walk to the park! That piqued my interest, so I planned a little getaway. The blog will feature a few layouts from the trip, but there was much more that I saw around town during my weekend visit. If you have a chance to go to Springfield, plan for at least a couple of days. 

This trip will, of course, get its own album. You might recognize this page from my bonus post on April 12th. Refresh your memory here.

On Saturday morning, I walked up the hill from my hotel to the Springfield Armory site. As you can see, the weather was nice for New England in December! The Armory was not quite open when I got to the bottom gate. As this was my first visit, I didn't know where the main entrance was, so I took photos here and kept walking up the hill. The land is now shared with a community college, so I knew that area would be open, and I was right. It added many steps to my journey, but it gave me a chance to see the quad as I approached the main building. 

I based this layout on Cheryl Even's Sketch #64. I liked the 6x4 photo stretched across the bottom, which I could replace with the park's unigrid. Since the gate pillars were brick, I chose a torn piece of brick paper for the bottom border element. The only other decoration is a border of rifles that I cut apart and tucked around the photos. The background paper is a sheet of gray tonal paper from my stash. I liked the texture of the brush strokes, which gave subtle highlights to the photos.

Bonus post: THIS is a Star Layout (LM #795)

Popping in on a rainy Saturday to post this layout on weapons of the World Wars. You'll see more of the Springfield Armory National Historic Site in a few weeks. The armory has been in place since just after the Revolutionary War and was one of the largest suppliers of arms to the military between then and the late 1950s. 

I based this layout on a pin I had saved. While the original pin had a more definitive Stars and Stripes approach, my layout picks up on the colors and the diagonal paper cuts. I made those by folding a piece of 12" paper diagonally, then aligning the long fold against the top of my trimmer with the point on the cutting line. It creates a perfect 1/2 page triangle, though you will see the fold on the page. The latest Lasting Memories challenge was to use THIS (stars) or THAT (hearts) on a layout. With a military theme, is there any doubt I was going to THIS? That's 3 of "This" in a row, I wonder if I will pick THAT next week! The thin 1/2" strips of stars also helped me hide the seam of the 2 triangles meeting. A few other star stickers from some old CM military sheets finished off the layout.

Bonus Post: THIS Title Page

Time for a Bonus Post as I play along with the Lasting Memories Challenges. This week's challenge has a choice of how to make a title, and I chose THIS — letter stickers. This is the title page for an album you'll be seeing in a few weeks for a trip to the Springfield Armory.

Because I was making the journey there by rail, I chose to recreate this pin I had saved to make my title page. I had purchased the Graphic 45 tablet called "Come Away With Me" many years ago, and I was happy to use up some of that material. The bottom of the page is a Graphic 45 calendar page, which I purchased separately. I bought a dozen of them, intending to make a calendar, and they've been sitting in my stash. I liked the idea of just using the edge as shown in the pin. Instead of photos, I used one of the cut-apart sheets and found the 4 boxes that make up the title image. It references not only the train I took but the industrial age of the armory I was about to visit. There is a matching sticker sheet with the letters, so I could spell out my title and two chipboard embellishments to round out the page.