Some NPS sites are sadder than others.

This entry looks at a layout from my first visit to the Flight 93 Memorial in 2007. My mom and brother joined Jim and I for a Pirates game in Pittsburgh. My brother Joe left the next morning for his cross-country solo road trip while Jim, my mom and I headed back to Harrisburg. On the way I wanted to stop at the site not only because it is a National Park but because I grew up just north of here in South Fork. This is the literal representation of the phrase "Hitting close to home".

The site is a small red barn and a fence. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, people leave tributes and memorabilia at the fence which the rangers collect and categorize. They have the transcripts of the black box recorder and reading it is incredibly saddening. We stayed to hear a volunteer talk about the flight events. All of the benches have the names of the victims engraved along the backs. One of them had the last name of Corrigan (no relation that I know of).

This was a more difficult layout to create. Although it is patriotic it also had to be subdued so the background of dark red with a light stripe worked well to bring out the dark memorial stones.

In this layout I finally figured out what to do with the large tag stickers that Creative Memories created. In previous layouts I had tried to write on them but being glossy, the ink just wiped away. The words "Pride and Honor" were all on one line in a sticker but I cut them into 3 parts and attached them to the tag and voila--a mini title. Similarly, I used the "Home of the Brave" to begin the title box. I really brought the emotion out. Simple stickers of hearts and stars finish the detail.

National Scrapbook Day!

Well, I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention that today is national scrapbook day. I hope you are working on NPS pages for NSD and if so I would like to see them. In that respect, I'll post another layout for this weekend. Here is a day trip Jim and I made to Assateague and Chincoteague Island.

Instead of heading to Atlantic Beach, NC for the family vacation, Jim's folks decided to stay closer to home in Ocean City MD. Jim and I took a day to get away and drove down to see the ponies. Not that we actually saw any, given our luck with wildlife.

Assateague Island is the National Park, Chincoteague is a National Wildlife Refuge but they share a unigrid. We only stopped at the Maryland side to get the stamps at the entrance center and spent most of our time at the Virginia side.

It's a fairly straightforward layout. The stripes on the top edges are simple design lines in red to help bring out the brickwork of the lighthouse. I purchased the die cut on the left and mounted it on blue not only to mimic the photo I took but because the white would have gotten lost on the page. This was a page done quite a few years ago and today I might have used chalking ink to dust the edges with a little color to help set it off from the page.

On the right the beach and pony stickers are from the National Parks scrapbook pack and really fill that space nicely. Sure more photo mats would make the page pop a bit but it's still a good composition.

This will take a little explaining

OK, so the next entry deals with a trip Jim and I made to the Poconos in March 2007. As you would expect, there was quite a bit of snow on the ground and to prove it, I'm going to include 2 layouts that illustrate this without actually including the national park entity. Here I am all bundled up at the sledding run across from our hotel.

The border on the right was from a class I took early on and I was happy to be able to use it finally. I don't get a lot of snow photos so I have plenty of decorations in stock ready to be deployed.

Below is another layout with us on the tubing run. Again the paper and border waited for me quite a while!

So, there's the proof that it was snowing. Here is the actual material from the National Park:

Well, I did say you can scrapbook without photos, just memorabilia. The postcards I picked up just didn't work with a snowy background so I chose a very rustic background paper in order to match the tone a little better.

We did drive through the park but with the weather (fresh snow falling) we didn't get to do much more than tour a visitor center. It's definitely a reason to go back. And maybe next time we'll go when it isn't snowing.

A little camping trip

My next entry covers a trip Jim and I made to Shenandoah National Park. While our 2nd trip to the area, this one would cover the entire length of Skyline Drive and includes an overnight stay inside the park.

This trip generated several pages so I started off with a single kick-off to introduce the trip (and because my previous layout ended as a one-pager on the left). It's mostly post cards and brochures with the exception of the photo of Jim on an outcropping of rock. The background is from a kit I earned for buying a lot of scrapbook supplies and is nature themed, so it will be featured throughout these layouts.

I am by nature a chronological scrapbooker, but these pages are more thematic based on what we saw. For instance, we saw deer in various places and on multiple days throughout the trip so I put all those photos on one page.

I love a good title, and thought this "Oh Deer" one really worked. You can see I'm using the nature kit again and the journal box matches in a way that almost makes it seem like a vellum overlay. On the right the dark brown paper is also from the same kit. The paper doesn't quite cover the page, but cutting a strip to put the white blank section just off center isn't a bad look for the page.

So technically, we visited 2 parks here--Shenandoah and the Appalachian Trail. Though somehow I neglected to get a unigrid for the AT.

Ah, another good title. The story of Jim mistaking a log for a bear is one of those that is remembered and repeated often. I was thinking about a title for a long time before I realized that "Bear false witness" summed up the story nicely. On these pages I used border strips and corners from the nature pack and accented with just a couple of stickers. I am quite proud of this layout.


The final 2 pages highlight our campsite and our excursion on horseback (which I highly recommend). Each page features a border that I made.

When you look at these pages individually they each work well, but as a 2-page layout it's a little unbalanced. So let's discuss each one separately.

On the left the border should have been placed at the bottom. With the die cut and stickers extending over the top it really pushes the border down the page. But the composition is fairly balanced so not a bad layout.

On the right the border at the top matches the nature page and you almost don't notice the white strip between the border and the photos. Again, the photos and journaling tells the story and the overall look is appealing.

Then when you look at them together you see the problem. The borders are unbalanced and it makes everything seem off kilter. Still, minor problems overall. And it was a great trip--that's what I want to remember.

Oh say can you see?

As you may have guessed from the title, my next park visit is Fort McHenry in Baltimore. Jim and I were celebrating our 10th anniversary that weekend and he lovingly allowed me to include a park stamp experience as part of our celebration.

We watched the movie at the visitor center and then toured the fort. This was 2006 and the video was made....oh maybe in the 70's? It was very old and dated. Still, it got the message across and we enjoyed the tour of the fort. We especially enjoyed finding a crate of ammunition produced in Jim's hometown area.

OK, wallpaper on the left, but a much better balance of photos and pattern than Ben Franklin's birthday pages. Hey, the fort is all about the Star Spangled Banner. Is there any other paper I could have used? I think not. On the right are just simple photo mats and corners which balance the composition nicely.

Also on the right is the admission sticker they gave us when we entered the visitor center. At the end of the tour I saved it by mounting it in the passport and then cutting it out and mounting it on the page. Because this was a white sticker on a white background I outlined the sticker with a marker. These days "chalking ink" which is essentially a lightly inked stamp pad, works better to define the edges. I have always struggled with "staying in the lines" when I color and I can clearly see the corner problem I had with the marker.

Happy Birthday Ben

Well, it's another trip to Philadelphia and I believe that I must by now have discovered the National Park Travelers Club and its wonderful Master List because otherwise I don't think I would have known that there was a stamp at the Franklin Institute. To be honest this only marginally qualifies for the blog because the Ben Franklin National Memorial is an affiliated site and not one of the "proper" National Park units.

During this visit, the Franklin Institute was hosting a presentation of Body Worlds and so Jim joined me and the surgical technology students on our annual journey to see the exhibit. This is as close to a national park as I will get on this trip. 

This is yet another example of "wallpaper" technique. But not a very good one. The print is just too busy for the photos. The matting on the left page actually does help. However, I didn't think I could mat the photos on the right without losing the essence of the photos. Maybe if I had put all three in a row across the middle it would help. I probably decided that the busy paper would REALLY overwhelm the photos then. Or I would consider it dead space even if there is a print. 

These days I would use portions of a paper this busy instead of the entire sheet. Border strips, small squares, or even banners and tags would break up the design to something more pleasing to the eye. 

Exploring MLK in Atlanta

Breaking out of a rut here--a park not mentioned so far! In December of 2005 I made a trip to Atlanta with my sister Lisa and her daughter Sierra. Although no longer living down there, Lisa still has ties to the area and I had a week long break so it was a win-win. (Except for the music part--this was the trip the Chicago musical CD got stuck in her car's audio system and we could only listen to "Jailhouse Tango" for the entire trip).

While Lisa went into her office for the day I headed out to the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. This included the visitor center, the church where he preached (and is buried) and an historic firehouse.

I have broken away from the neutral colored pages and returned to plain white. The borders along the edge are pre-cut strips from a pack. It looks like I chose yellow to compliment the 2 postcards I purchased, and with a little more yellow as photo mats, I find a good deal of balance in the page. The 2 stickers come from the National Parks scrapbook kit and also lend a little decoration to the page.

If you look at the unigrid closely, it is mounted on the page with clear photo mounting corners. If I cannot find pockets for the memorabilia, I do prefer photo corners. It is a little tricky to get the item to mount in a straight line but once you perfect the technique (start with diagonal upper and lower corners) they provide a secure method of mounting to the page with the option to retrieve and review in the future. What sorts of memorabilia do you routinely collect to add to your pages? Share with me in a comment below. I'd love to hear from you!