Along the Mall

My next page is just a few random monuments that I went by on my way back to the Metro. The top left photo is John Paul Jones whose statue is in a very busy traffic island. To the right is the World War Memorial for DC and of course the bottom is the Washington Monument. I liked the sunset look here too. In fact, it is probably just me turning 180-degrees from my picture of the Lincoln Memorial in the WWII reflecting pool.

The page was created from this challenge on the Creative Memories Blog. Although I didn't participate in that virtual crop, I do save all the ideas in my Pinterest folder and often come back to do them later. I liked the easy way I created the background. This actually allowed me to use some of my 8 1/2 x 11" paper because I could cut off strips and layer them into a "V" on the page. Once the pieces were in place, I trimmed off the excess at the edges. The title is a die cut from the Eastern National scrapbook pack. Then I just had to mount the photos and journal and it was done!

This ends my DC trip, but next week I will highlight a trip to Wisconsin!

Another stop at WWII

It's just before Memorial Day, so a perfect time to post this visit to the WWII memorial.

Until writing this blog, I don't think I realized how many times I visited the WWII memorial. It may actually be a higher visit count than Independence! Coming off the Tidal Basin, I had to go past this area on my way to the Metro station, and so it's always nice to stop. As the sun was setting, I couldn't take many photos, but I did like the sunset view of the Lincoln Monument over the reflecting pool. Of course I had to take a photo of the Army Air Forces symbol as I remember my grandfather who served in the war in that branch of the military.

When I found this paper, I KNEW I had to use it for the WWII memorial. The wall on the other side of the reflecting pool is filled with stars representing those who died during the war. I mounted everything on black to set it off from the field of stars. The unigrid even got mounted on black cardstock. The bottom of the page is another black strip of paper with a border sticker of stars from Paper House's Washington DC cardstock stickers. Above that is a die cut of the WWII memorial from the Eastern National.

A New Monument

After leaving FDR, I headed to the newest member of the Tidal Basin--MLK. The monument is fairly straightforward, but very profound.

For this page, I wanted to do something to highlight the "moving lines" on the statue in the bottom left photo. That's why I chose striped paper and turned it to the side. With a little judicious trimming I was able to get all the components into one 12x12 page including the unigrid, a journal box and a decorative sticker (from the Eastern National scrapbook pack).

The Roosevelts

After leaving the George Mason memorial, I made my way around the Tidal Basin to the Roosevelt Memorial. Never having been there before I accidently entered at the end and viewed all the rooms backwards!

I didn't really know what to do with my lone photo of Eleanor, so I decided to give her a solo page. The background is one of the Gallivant fast-to-fabulous pages. I rooted through my Eastern National materials and found the die cut of Eleanor and the 5x7 card on the left. I suppose the card could have been a photo mat, but I thought it also worked well as a journal box. The same image of Eleanor is on the card so I thought it worked well.

OK, on to FDR. The monument is divided into rooms representing his 4 terms. Each is filled with symbolic statues and some sort of water element.

The left page is the back of the fast-to-fabulous which I really liked. To make a match on the right I found a piece of gray paper for the bottom and a red and gold remnant for a top border. The yellow mat under the photo also helps to pull the page together. The mat under the photo of me and FDR was chosen for the pale green paper which reminded me of the patina of the statues.

One of the most moving sections was the room featuring the challenges of the depression. Apologies for the blurriness of the photo, I had an issue with lighting.

For this page I used the new Archivers paper from Creative Memories as well as some older retro stickers from the early days of Creative Memories. I thought the brown tones went well with the rugged looking statues.

Thomas Jefferson and George Mason

Happy National Scrapbook Day! As this is posting, I'm at a weekend scrap to celebrate the event. Creative Memories began this day many years ago on the first Monday in May.

This layout is part of my visit around Washington DC and I wanted to walk the Tidal Basin. I had never been to any of those memorials and I was excited to see them all. Each one will get its own post on the blog, so stick with me over the next few weeks to see them all.

First up is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. What an enormous statue! It's a beautiful memorial with text of his famous documents engraved on the walls. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the photos. Not sure why they came out so blurry this time.

This layout was created with what Creative Memories calls a "Project Recipe". I have the original PDF version, but you can see the idea page here through a pin on Pinterest. So, you'll notice there's no blue in my layout. That's because I used paper from the Imagine paper pack. I wanted the black and red colors as this is a very bold set of photos. The contrast color of yellow actually threw me for a bit but as I look at my creation, I'm liking it more and more. I changed some photos for the unigrid, one for a die cut of a camera, and one for a journal box. Like page sketches, the project recipes are starting points. Make the layout work for you, don't try to jam your photos into something that doesn't tell the story.

Very close to the Jefferson Memorial is a little known memorial for George Mason. He was instrumental in assisting with the creation of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Definitely a forgotten hero.

This layout was created from a sketch. The idea is to use one piece of double-sided paper and cut and arrange it to highlight 3 photos. Here is the sketch. As you can see, I turned it 90-degrees to the left because my photos were oriented slightly differently. The red paper and striped paper are the same page, just 2 different sides. The stars are a border sticker that I thought worked well. I didn't use as many stickers as recommended, but I don't see any "bare" areas that concern me.

Great Falls

In May 2012 I traveled to DC for a surgical technology convention. In my spare time I visited a few parks. My first trip took me back to the C&O Canal on the Maryland side (where the Great Tavern is). We had been here the previous August with the NPTC convention. This time I was able to find the trail to the falls, and it made for a completely different visit.

This is a wallpaper technique. I used a piece of older Creative Memories paper from a travel kit. I liked the way the design looked like falling water. This is just the right hand side of the layout because the left focused on my convention activities, so I actually posted the end of the trail first--the falls. But that gives good context for what comes next. One notable piece to this page is that I used photo corners to mount the unigrid as I usually do. However, I had 3 made of black paper from my stash (older than 8 years I think), and since they didn't detract from the unigrid, I used them. I couldn't use the 4th one because it would have partially covered the title--so I used one clear corner mount in the upper left.

The new part of my park experience was the walk to the falls. It was an easy walk across planked wood for the most part but took me past some very nice plant and animal displays.

The left page of this layout is also wallpaper. I toyed with the idea of cutting out the left edge as a border but decided I liked the all blue background. I tried to match it on the right with some blue and green mats in the same shades. The right border is another scrap of paper in blue tones. I layered the stickers at the top and bottom onto dark blue paper to make them pop and used a corner rounder to try to match the shape of the stickers. A little dragonfly in the middle made for a pleasing symmetry. And on this unigrid, since the bottom has some color, I used all clear photo corners.

Little known parts of Independence

May of 2012 and it's "Take My Students to the Mutter" time again! On this afternoon, once I dispersed the students to their own devices, I walked through some areas I'd never visited before. They are loosely affiliated with Independence, or at least they list them on their website. Benjamin Rush was a physician during the Revolutionary War and he lived in Philadelphia. He actually helped found the College of Physicians of Philadelphia where the Mutter Museum is located, so I've been learning about him through my many visits there. They have a medicinal herb garden named after him. On my walk through Philly I found his house site and his grave. Christ Church is known more for having Ben Franklin buried there, but it was a double treasure for me to see Rush's grave.

Both pages are wallpaper. On the left I needed something to balance the greenery of the photos, so chose brown tones. I like the swirl on the paper--it makes me think of Grecian columns. The journal box was from the Vintage card pack from Creative Memories. I thought the edge set off from the swirls nicely. On the right is actually a remnant of paper. I mounted it right and then tried to "hide" the missing left edge by mounting the map of the burial ground and the photo of Franklin's grave flush left. There's a tiny bit of un-papered page showing, but not much.

My other stop of the day wasn't exactly part of Independence NHP, but it was in the same genre. There is a group that keeps the Ross house as a museum. The Ross's were real people, but there is no real proof she sewed the flag of our country. Nonetheless, it's a good way to teach people about liberty and the house tour was a nice end to my visit.

This is of course wallpaper again. I thought the antique looking flag the perfect background. The circle of stars frames the entry ticket nicely and the stripes provide a nice background to the photo of the house and the commemorative plaque. I wish I could remember where the paper came from, but nothing comes to mind.