Newsworthy

We made the newspaper! On Saturday we held the convention in a meeting room at one of our hotels.

For the news article, I found a background page that was newsprint. Oddly enough it came from a tablet of Christmas papers. I had a couple of 5x7 photo sleeves to preserve the actual newspaper. Creative Memories products are great at protecting from the high acid content found in newspapers. Keeping them in these protective sleeves will prevent decay from leaching to other parts of the page. I'm hoping it also keeps them readable for many years. You can also scan newspaper and use photos of the page to keep stories.

On the right page, I used my handy sketch seen in previous weeks but used only the left hand side. I only had the 2 photos (one of the convention and one of the hotel welcome sign). I used my nametag and a journal box for two of the right hand elements and then dug out a tag and used a couple of ranger stickers from the EN pack as an embellishment.

Contraband

On Saturday morning Jim and I drove to the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center. The path from the parking lot to the front doors is strewn with cast bronze items reminiscent of items found during an archeological dig. Inside the center are exhibits about how freed slaves struggled to begin a new life after emancipation. The term used for those refugees at the time was "Contraband".

Do you recognize the layout? If you look closely it is the 1-2-3 sketch I've used in each of the past few weeks. This time I squeezed a journal box between the left side photos, and used 2 full 4x6 photos on the bottom right. The paper is not actually double sided. I chose 2 scraps of black and white patterned paper and cut them to the sizes of the sketch. I added a few antique stickers and some ivy for the upper right corner. Since the items along the path were of such variety, just about any sticker I owned worked on the page.

While at the center we had 2 ranger talks. The first one was a musket firing demonstration in authentic wool uniform. In Mississippi. In July. Brave man! (Though in all seriousness the weather was quite mild). When done, he changed into his NPS uniform and talked about battles around the city.

Since the primary theme is the musket firing demo, I pulled out the musket paper on the right as well as other gun stickers. The left page was in a similar brown tone and had pre-pasted blue and dark brown paper. To be able to see the "Ranger Talk" stickers, I mounted them on a piece of vellum. The background still shows through but the letters stand out. When adhering vellum, Creative Memories makes a great adhesive that turns invisible when rubbed to adhere to the page.

Snatches of Natchez

After our tour of Brices Cross Roads we drove down to the Natchez Trace Parkway visitor center. In addition to a ranger talk about the parkway we took a stroll on the nature trail which leads from the parking lot. In that way we could visit 2 parks at once!

This layout uses a 1-2-3 layout from Noreen Smith. The paper is an older CM pattern called "Enchanted". I thought the florals and dots worked perfectly with the items available for me. This is another instance of not having any real photos. On the left page the top two images are cut from one of the brochures of the area. On the right page I supplemented the unigrid with a journal box and a decorative mat (the banners were actually on the mat!) Since the unigrids are so dark, I decided to pep them up a bit with red photo mounting corners. I only had 4 so by using 4 black and alternating them, both unigrids were mounted.

We have come to a cross roads

We arrived in Mississippi and joined a club tour of Brices Cross Roads. This is a very tiny site of federal land but we toured the state and local sites as well.

This may be one of my least inspired layouts ever because it is just brown wallpaper. I only had a few photos of the grounds so I chose to open the unigrid so that the full picture shows. To balance that I chose some die cuts of a canon and swabber for the right. Since the photos had a lot of green and blue I didn't mat them on the page.

At one of the tour sites was a cemetery with graves of the civil war soldiers. Very little of the remaining battle sites are "photographic" but there is a recreated bridge that I captured.

For this layout I chose to play along with a Scrapbook.com sketch challenge. There are discussion boards where crafters challenge each other and the monthly 2-page sketch featured hexagons. I chose gray and black and then looked at the yellow lettering on the graves sign to choose the yellow as the 3rd design element. (There's 2 shades of gray so really there are 4 design colors). I punched my little hexagons with the CM punch from several years ago and it was a little hard on my hand to get them all. I just punched a bunch of each color and then started making the design in the upper left corner. By ensuring that colors alternated throughout I painted a path to the lower right corner and repeated the process on the right page. The tombstones on the left page are cut on the Cricut from a halloween file. But since we're talking historic graves, they fit in well. A few other stickers from my Civil War stockpile completed the pages.

Among the tree tops

We drove further into the Great Smokies with the intent to climb Clingmans Dome. We did it!

On the left is a remnant of paper from the Best in Show pack from CM. Although it's made for animals, the paper is quite useful for many layouts and the clouds were especially useful here. Along the bottom is a sticker border I wanted to use. I was surprised to find that it was really 3 stickers, but they went together so nicely I left them stacked (bottom grass, road and mountain). I added the words "scenic route" to a sign sticker and a vellum car. To me, tht border encapsulates our trip up to the hiking trail. On the right is a page I had originally intended to use for a Girl Scout page. The trees and brown tones also matched the scenic view.

I won't lie, the hike--although short--is strenuous because you start at a higher elevation and climb up another 1000 feet or so. I had to stop often to catch my breath and that's why I chose to have a little fun with the photo of me reaching the top (while gasping for breath).

Still, it's not that I want to highlight that photo so I covered it with a Peekaboo pocket and put the journaling on top. Then on the inside I found a decorative mat that also captured the thrill of the climb!

Mountain home

In the summer of 2013, the NPTC convention was at Shiloh National Military Park. Events were in both Tennessee and Mississippi, and Jim and I planned a 2-day drive to get to the convention. On our way there we stopped at Great Smoky Mountains and drove through the eastern side of the park.

I wanted to use up some of my Fast to Fabulous travel pages, so I pulled out 2 with travel stamps on them (though from 2 different packs). When trying to coordinate the layout, I ran out of room for some of the memorabilia so I added an 8 1/2 x 11 pocket page to hold the brochures. The left page is really just the one photo of me arriving at the visitor center and then I used a mat card (remember what I said about my class from last week!) In trying to tie all the pages together I chose a zig-zag border maker cartridge and cut several coordinating colored borders. The first 2 are in gray tones on the top of the left page and remind me of the mountain chain. On the front of the pocket page I made a border with the Cricut and the Campin' Critters cartridge. Those badges remind me of my Girl Scout days! I used the same paper as the border background to make the zig-zag for the right side.

At the visitor center is a collection of houses taken from the various parts of the mountains and collected to make a village.

For the back of the pocket page I used a deep red cardstock for the zig zags and then for added interest, used them diagonally on the page.  That red was also a good choice because of the red element on the left page that peeks through (the backpack). The right side, the F2F is just 3 photos and 2 stickers so the page came together quickly.

The next few layouts go into the homestead in more detail including the inside of cabins we could see and some of the other buildings common to a mountain home.

I dug through my papers and came up with some very good matches to the photos. On the left, the wood resembles the interior of the cabin. On the right the background is from Club Scrap's farm line. The shed and fence worked perfectly for the outdoor area. On the left, an orange "cut apart" from the same Club Scrap line worked well to break up the dark colors. The title worked perfectly too given the humble abode!

Just a few more outbuildings including a forge!

And this is another example of the sketch that I used last week for the bridge at Moore's Creek. This time paper was from the CM Adventure pack plus some decorative mats from Paper Loft, Club Scrap and some other pack that I apparently bought with farm life :) This time where the 3 photos are to go on the bottom of the right hand page I layered 2 photos to give a better image of the interior of the forge. That's the great thing about sketches, they are FLEXIBLE!

King George and Broadswords

Before we get into this week's post, I wanted to remind you that May 4th (the first Saturday in May) is National Scrapbook Day! It's always a good excuse to sit in the scraproom and create! Enjoy!

While at the beach with the inlaws, I chose a day to see Moore's Creek National Battlefield. This is a Revolutionary War battlefield (a little different from all the civil war sites I had been seeing). This battle is also a key element in a novel by Diana Gabaldon and so I was keen to see it in person. The drive from our beach house was 2 hours but for me well worth the drive!

Once again I began on the right page. The 2 historic canon from the battle were one of the highlights of my visit and though the wall paper I used was really for civil war, the short barrel made it ideal to highlight this time period. I probably should have matted the photos as they seem to be getting lost on the page though. On the left is an old piece of CM paper from the "Discover and Delight" line. I liked the grittiness of the background and sort of thought the dots along the top could be cannonballs :)

Another key feature of the park is the bridge on the left page below. The Americans removed many of the timbers and greased those that were left to prevent the British from crossing the creek.

This layout is from a class I am taking with Noreen Smith (Organized and Creative Mom). I cannot post the sketch, because of the rules of the class but it is one of her classic 1-2-3 layouts. The class theme is Scrap Your Stash, and for January we were encouraged to use up journal cards and decorative mats. The background paper is from Paper Loft. The top left mat card is from the CM Archivers line. The rest of the cards are so old it's a mystery where they are from! (I do know that the History title is from the EN scrapbook kit. I thought layering it on the circle a nice touch). I like that on the right page I used the postcard to stand in for 2 photo elements of the sketch. What will be interesting is that I used this same sketch 3 or 4 times on different park pages and you'll see it again and get a chance to compare them next week.