Happy Trails part 15--White Sands (the sand)

The club met at one of the picnic pavilions for our Friday get together. There are also individual picnic tables (shown below) which can be turned to provide shade. They remind me of sailboats a little. Dinner was nice, but it was just fun to talk to all my friends I hadn't seen in quite a while.

This layout is from Club Scrap. I had only purchased the "cut apart" sheets for the picnic theme and had to supplement the designer paper and background pages with items from my stash (which is not a bad way to use up product). The blue/green stripe paper came from the Cool Serenity line that I had used on the first White Sands pages so this became the perfect way to move to the dinner portion of the park. Notice that the original layout on the bottom right calls for 3 vertical photos cut small and angled. But, I had 2 horizontal photos that bridged those 3 spaces and I like that EVEN BETTER! 

After dinner, we joined 2 of the park rangers for a walk along the dunes while they told us all about the park. It was a large group but we all managed to stay together and the walk was quite pleasant. Until we turned around and realized that there was a storm brewing behind us and it was heading straight for us! The rangers gathered us all together and herded us back to the pavilion. The "sand" storm (as I said last week, it's really gypsum) created a great exfoliating facial (has to be some sort of silver lining right?) and while uncomfortable as we walked through it was not truly damaging. Once back at the pavilion we did have time to get our junior rangers sworn in before heading home for the day.

These 2 pages were created using Photo Dies. The left page uses the hexagon from Kit #6, while the right uses Kit #18. I probably need to buy a few more as they have some nice new designs. I like the concept of the page stencils (Lea France and Creative Memories both make those) but I don't have the evenness when cutting and I'm always disappointed in how they turn out. With photo dies, the cuts are perfect every time and because it's a 2-sided die, it cuts the frame and the photo simultaneously. That also leaves the inner mat as another shape and on the left page, I was able to use those to fill the corners. Those were filled with fussy-cut photos and titles and the page was complete!

Happy Trails part 14--White Sands (the sun)

 After leaving Fort Selden, I drove to White Sands National Monument (it was then, it has since been updated to a National Park). We had planned an NPTC picnic there. I arrived with enough time to explore the park on my own a bit. It's important to note that while it is called "sand" it is not the same material you would find on a seaside beach. This is a huge amount of gypsum that has been liberated from the nearby mountains and washed into the plateau. However, it certainly still acts like sand--forming dunes and supporting grasses and wildlife. I didn't try it but people also use it as snow and will toboggan down the dunes (this is an approved use of the park).

This layout is based on a Pinterest layout I saved. I was torn with how to scrapbook these pages and decided that I would think about "sands" as a beach and went through my beach/tropical board for inspiration. The blue and white really seemed to fit nicely with the photos and I was quite happy with the results. I used paper from the "Cool Serenity" line which CM had a few years ago.

After the visitor center, I stopped at a nature trail along a boardwalk. It was hot and sunny but there were a lot of great sights along the walk.

This layout is based on a 1-2-3 sketch by Noreen Smith. I rarely do this but I actually copied her sample EXACTLY. What I added to the layout was the dots down the left side and across the top of the right page. These were made using the new CM Dot Pens. These create different size dots depending on how long you press. I probably should be more tolerant of "white space" on my pages but I just felt that there needed to be something along those edges.

50 States Album Part 15--New Mexico

My foray into New Mexico has so far been limited to my NPTC convention trip in 2015. The convention itself was in El Paso, TX, but our weekend events extended into the surrounding area. El Paso is not that far from the New Mexico line and I spent a full day exploring various NPS sites.

This page is based on the elements of this layout. I merged the state flag and the state cutout so I could include the photo of the Welcome sign--even though I'm not in it. It serves as the title of the page in a way. I rather like the desert structures in the bottom right corner It was a free cut and I think the tones of yellow give it depth for such a simple cut. Yellow mats tied the rest of the page together. It was a fairly quick layout.