On a Mission part 3: Mission Concepcion

We've reached 200 blog entries today! I hope you are enjoying these entries as much as I do. 

My last mission to visit was Mission Concepcion which has a bit of a different shape to its buildings. There is a lot of ground left but not much else.

For this layout, I cut a piece of paper in half and used it to wallpaper the left side of the page. This is because the paper is actually for Arizona and I had to cut away that portion. 😀 I matted the photos with some vibrant orange to give a little life to the page (as much as I like that paper, it's a little drab--and so are the stones of the actual church).

On a Mission part 2--San Jose

I next drove to the San Jose Mission which is the main visitor center for the parks. This is also the largest and best-preserved site of all the missions. In hindsight, I should have started here because the rangers would have been able to tell me about the staffing times at the other missions. While here I took a ranger walk with a group of random visitors. You can do a self-guided tour, and some of the families who chose to do that were reprimanded by our ranger for not being respectful of the grounds (the children, with the apparent consent of the parents, were climbing out of the window openings in the housing section.) So please--if you visit any of our great National Park units, treat them as if they were your own house.

The first pair of layouts started with the right page (as so many of mine do). This is one of the fast-to-fabulous pages. I've found that orange and brown tones work well with the southwest architecture and so I chose to incorporate this page. It helped that my pictures were oriented correctly as these older pages have mats built-in for photos. I trimmed one photo down to 4x4 and used the rest of the mat space as a journaling box. To make the left page match, I chose some scraps of orange and yellow paper to mat photos and the unigrid. I also used the yellow paper and the Medallion border maker cartridge to make the corner border.

Our tour took us through the various parts of the compound which included the church but also the daily life areas such as homes, baking ovens, and the gates of the compound. The interior photo of the church is actually a post card. I rarely photograph inside active churches.

The left page above is the reverse of the F2F from the first layouts shown. I simply had to lay the photos in place and the page was done. On the right, I chose to stack the 3 remaining horizontal photos. That left a 6x12 spot on the right of the page which I filled with scrap orange paper. The journal box matches the F2F front-side page and I found a coordinating mat to frame the last vertical photo.

On a Mission part 1--Espada and San Juan

While in San Antonio, I wanted to visit all of the missions. Jim had no interest so I set off in the morning and drove to the most southern of the missions--Mission Espada. I was earlier than the park opened so I had a chance to look around the outside. I waited for the posted hours for the visitor center to open, but no one arrived so I chose to drive over to the aqueduct that was nearby. Based on the same principles the Romans used, this aqueduct carried water to the settlement--water was important for the survival of the area. 

The layout is based on a sketch from my year-long scrapbook class (so I can't share it). It was actually a single page sketch, and I doubled it. I liked the way the triangles met and formed a shape reminiscent of the front of the missions. The paper is a mixture of an orange print and a piece from the Memoirs and Memories pack that was a little industrial. But the colors matched the color of the mission walls so you can't really see the gears and rivets until you look closely. I added a few stickers from a very old Yellow Design Lines packet. The squares sort of resemble a cross.

Below, you can see the aqueduct up close as well as the next visit I made--Mission San Juan. This site is unmanned so I gave myself a tour by reading all the signs and then moved on. More missions next week!

The left page is another sketch from our April class (so again, I can't show you). I used one block to have a journaling square rather than another photo. I had to manufacture some letters, but I thought the "Agua" title turned out well. 

On the right, I didn't use any inspiration. I had pulled paper packs with oranges and yellows when I started on the mission pages knowing those work well with Southwestern theme pages. I had one ombre yellow page which I turned sideways and then added the sun borders (CM Border Maker Cartridge). The middle sticker is the Alamo, but without the title, it rather looks like a church so I thought it decorated the page nicely. To pull a little more yellow into the middle, I added the Yellow Rose of Texas.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.....

We next drove to the LBJ ranch which is still a working ranch. We did the auto loop through the ranch and THEN found out there is an entrance fee to pay at the Ranger Station. We didn't know our timing so we didn't pre-purchase tours of the house. I think I'd like to do that if we ever get back. We did get to see the animals as well as his Air Force One plane. At the Ranger Station we discovered that this park abuts a state park dedicated to preserving farm life of the early 20th century (before electricity and running water). If you have an extra hour or two you should explore it!

I debated showing this as 2 individual pages but decided that it was just as easy to talk about the differences in one paragraph. The left paper is a simple wallpaper. When I realized I had cow photo paper, I HAD to use it. The windmill is a VERY old CM die-cut. 

The right page is a sketch from one of my classes, so I cannot show you the base. I struggled to put the map of the ranch on this page. Look closely--do you see it? Nope. I finally realized it added nothing to the story so I left it out. I do have some military stickers and had an Air Force title sticker. I thought adding the giant "1" sticker as well as that blue plane die-cut put the whole layout in context.

Back in Time--LBJ's Boyhood Home

It's time to return to our chronological pages! As you may have forgotten, the last post in the chronological albums was 8 months ago and featured Manassas in October 2014. It wasn't until May of 2015 that I had any additional park photos to share. Jim and I had taken a trip to Texas as I was speaking at a Surgical Technology Conference. We added a few days of sightseeing before the conference and we traveled first to the LBJ National Historic Site. This is a collection of sites and the first stop after the visitor center was the Boyhood Home.

What you see above is an 8 1/2 x 11 pocket page. I had trouble getting the brochure onto the layout and so decided to use the pocket to give me some extra room. I used a piece of patterned paper as the background, using something similar to what would go on the next page to have some consistency. If you see this book in person you'll see that you can just see the edge of the following page along the side.

We toured the home with a ranger--just Jim and me on the tour. It's a very primitive house full of lovely vintage pieces. These are my favorite types of structures to visit. I love the old kitchen stoves and the hand-operated gears. Not that I don't like modern conveniences. I just find the setting homey.

The photo on the top of the right page is a combination to create the panorama. No sketch or inspiration page this time--I just went through my supplies and tried to arrange things in a way that would highlight the photos.

50-states Album Part 32--Wyoming

This is the last page in my 50-states album. As I visit additional states or find photos of the trip, I will post more pages. I've been to 39 states and have shown you about 32 layouts. Next week we'll go back to my chronological albums and trip albums.

Wyoming was a state we passed through on the Great Western Loop in the summer of 2017. We flew into Denver, rented a car, and drove to South Dakota. We had GREAT fun going to Fort Laramie (tip--do not follow your GPS unless you like driving on dirt roads!) We also got to visit Devil's Tower (go ahead with the Close Encounters theme in your head now). Wyoming is a wild place and you really should visit. We enjoyed our time there and have lots of memories to look back on and laugh.

This layout is based on this sketch. Clearly, I used only 1/2 of the page. I owned a sticker of barbed wire, wood-grained paper and the appropriate card stock so I could really do this one justice. The cowboy/cowgirl and horse were cut on the Cricut. I had actually used them once before in a different album but I thought them a perfect fit to a story about Jim and I traveling out west. The state shape of Wyoming is not that interesting so I jazzed up the state name by finding a font that looked like a rope. You can look at DaFont.com if you want to find some really different free fonts for cutting or writing. This time I used a pen in the Cricut--not something I do a lot of but it made the rope look real to me. I had to trim each letter by hand but I think that made it work on the page better.

50-states Album Part 31: Wisconsin

I've only been to Wisconsin once. In the summer of 2012 I drove from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin for a National Park Traveler's convention. It took me 2 days to drive out because I stopped at several other locations along the way. On the return trip I stopped at the Osh Kosh air show--one of the largest in the country. Even that was not enough to get my husband to travel with me to Wisconsin!

I never really had an inspirational layout for this page. I started with a die-cut image of a mouse wearing a Packer's cheesehead. But as I looked through my stash, I found that I had this piece of Wisconsin themed paper and that's all I needed! Truly the easiest of the 50 pages to put together. (Not that I didn't have similar pages for other states, I just resisted using them--Wisconsin was the hardest to locate a themed page to copy.) Other than the photos, all I contributed to the page was the diecut of the state in Packer Yellow and a couple of Packer stickers (also leftover from scrapping this trip).