Along the Outer Banks

In August 2015 I started driving to the annual vacation spot in North Carolina. For this trip, I hugged the coast a bit more stopping in Manteo to see Fort Raleigh as well as refreshing my stamps at a couple of other nearby parks such as Cape Hatteras and Wright Brothers National Memorial. My Wright Brothers stop was so brief, all I got was a brochure and the stamps. I love the long drive by myself though I appear in fewer photos. The weather was great and I learned a lot on the trip.

This page commemorates my stops at 3 different parks. The borders were copied from this Pinterest item. It uses the Cool Serenity papers that I had handy from my White Sands pages. I intentionally made the wave borders going in opposite directions. I think it adds visual interest that way. The middle of the page uses some stickers I had purchased in the Atlantic Beach area years ago. The large square cut in half brings the 2 sides together. The stickers luckily had the same tones as the CM paper and stickers so you don't really notice they are from 2 packs. After I photographed this layout I realized that I had printed the lighthouse in 2 sizes so I switched to a 5x7 photo with less mat showing. 

My stop was designed to pick up a new park: Fort Raleigh. Not only did I get to see the park sites but I stayed for their outdoor performance of the Lost Colony (including a back-stage tour!). I recommend seeing that play if you have time and are in the area. The visitor center has a lot of great dioramas and interactive displays as well. A nice day-long visit.

My next layout is based off a layout I saved from the original Creative Memories blog. You can see it on my Pinterest page here. I turned the page 90-degrees to accommodate my horizontal photos. I dug out my corner rounder for this layout as well. I used to use that on every photo originally but now it's just for special occasions. I used up some of the old CM Cottage paper and stickers for this one. Using patterned paper for some blocks meant that I didn't need a ton of photos. I also used them as journaling boxes and a place for title stickers. 

Out of the fire

My last layout for the Meetup trip is of the final steps pouring the molten iron and revealing the finished product. We were a few rows back in the audience so it was hard to get good shots of the craftsmen pouring the liquid metal. They make very small batches now. I'm sure when the furnace was in full production the cauldrons were much larger. 

This layout is based on a free sketch I got from Club Scrap. Due to COVID 19, the Lancaster Scrapbook Convention was transitioned to virtual. We were sent to this website for the directions (there's a video as well) but we had to supply our own papers. I chose a piece of textured paper that looked like rusted metal from the Creative Memories Timeworn paper pack. I added a sheet of cardstock called "Copper". I was hoping it was a shimmery paper but it ended up just looking dull green. If you look at the website, the sample pages have a LOT more photos, even putting small photos in the four squares across the top right page. I didn't have many photos left of the day so I spread them around and filled some of the remaining blocks with stickers and journal boxes. The frame around the 4x4 photo on the left page is from the Memoirs and Memories embellishment kit.

Casting begins

During our time at Hopewell Furnace, we got to walk through several areas demonstrating the production of iron pieces. The left page focuses on the creation of heat. Water runs over a wheel which pumps a bellows. That pushes air into the furnace to increase the heat. In the photo below, I'm listening to the rush of air through the pipe as it heads to the furnace. On the right we watched re-enactors preparing a mold to be cast. It was just like when I was in metal shop in high school!

I made this page as I took a "Summer Camp" class for scrapbooking. The week's challenge was to take one of our punches and turn it into a stamp. I used the Medallion punch on a styrofoam plate and then secured that to a wooden block leftover from our stamping days. I did not re-ink the stamp each time I pressed down. This enabled me to get gradations of the image. The styrofoam was thin so you can see that I inadvertently inked the block and that showed up on the page as well. I used metal designed stickers and die cuts to finish the page. 

The best memories are made on the farm

Hopewell Furnace ran in a time when everyone kept their own farm animals--sheep for wool or meat, chickens for eggs, and horses to pull wagons. That life is kept alive today and we enjoyed visiting all the animals during our tour.

I'm 95% certain that I used a sketch for this layout. However, I cannot figure out where I got it. So if you recognize it, please let me know so I can give credit. The papers are from the very old "Discover" line from Creative Memories. I like it because it has a very rural or rustic feel to it. The distressed elements--faded edging, light tarnish accents--seem to fit with the farm life. Added to the page are some animal stickers which are also older CM. The borders at the tops of both pages are from a non-CM source. I found a few other companies with packs of farm-theme papers and stickers. And the tones matched the Discover theme well. 

Making charcoal

 The reason for our meetup was the demonstration of making charcoal. This process was done on a much larger scale, and every day, when the site functioned as a furnace. Now they have special demonstrations twice a year. The people who work the site in period clothing attended (I realized later who they were) and gave an element of reality to the event. The sign about fire being hot made me chuckle though.

I follow several other scrapbooking blogs and this one had a page I wanted to try. I didn't sign up for the boot camp, but this layout follows the half-page technique displayed. It is 1 piece of decorative paper cut in half and spread on 2 pages, then one piece of cardstock cut into specific strips. I did have to use another piece of cardstock to punch the rustic fence border across the bottom but all of the mats and the 2 thin strips along the paper are from one sheet of cardstock. The CM 12" trimmer has a measurement line on the side of the cutting blade and that helps to be able to make the cuts to get four 4.25x6.25 inch mats. 

My First Meet-up

 My next journey was not long after returning from Chamizal. It was special in its own way though because the National Park Travelers Club had recently developed a Meet-up program to encourage people to visit the parks together. We would receive a special meet-up stamp, as well as the park stamp, and both would count toward our yearly tallies. Vanessa put this one together on a weekend where Hopewell Furnace was doing a program on charcoal making. It was the fuel needed when the furnace was running daily--1800s. The buildings were renovated and recreated to be authentic to when this was a booming business.

I made this page for the July 2022 CM Virtual Crop. You can see the sketch on this page. I used an old piece of Discover(I think) CM paper. Since the border was pre-made I just had to fill in with photos and make a border at the bottom. I chose 2 pieces of CM Shortcuts. These were packs of decorative borders in various cardstock colors. The 2 I picked ended up looking like mountains and a fence and that worked well with the rustic feel of the photos. The middle embellishment is a flower from an old heritage pack. This came together quickly with the patterned paper!

Happy Trails part 23--the Final Entry

 The last of my trip was a night-time visit to Carlsbad Caverns. While I can certainly count this as a unit visited I did not arrive early enough to visit the caves. I was able to tour the visitor center and then head to the Amphitheater for the Bat Flight presentation. Our club snagged several rows together and we had fun calling to the newcomers at the top of the staircase. My husband still can't believe I attended this event because I tend to freak out when a bat flies in the house. Luckily none tangled in my hair that night! There are only daytime photos because phones, cameras, and other electrical devices are prohibited once the bats start emerging from the caves.

In a rather unusual burst of enthusiasm, I completed this page a little earlier than normal. One of the Facebook pages I followed showed how to make the bats--from an Airplane Border Maker Cartridge! They are punched from black paper, turned upside down, and embellished with a white gel pen for the eyes. I knew I just HAD to make the page right then (it was October 2018 and I was still a couple of years away from completing the album). So it's been sitting in one of my pre-made page containers waiting until I got to this album. Because I made it so far in advance, I used cardstock as the base. I found 2 close shades in the yellow/orange family. Then I took one sheet of stone paper from the CM Textures pack and cut it to make the non-symmetrical layout. I made 3 12" strips of "bats" and layered them across the middle. A few bat stickers and die cuts from my Halloween collection helped create the bat flight across the page.

I was having trouble getting all the photos on the page so I used a peekaboo pocket on the photo above the park brochure. If you lift it, the journaling is underneath. Hindsight is 2020. I didn't realize when I made this that it would be the last page in the album. Had I been planning it out, I would have rearranged the layout to make 3 pages with the last of the photos as the final entry. 

And that leads us to the final page. I struggled with what to put on the page but finally found inspiration in making a closing page similar to my kick-off pages. I used the "Happy Trails" theme to say goodbye and to talk a little about the upcoming convention in Philadelphia. (That set of pages has been covered if you look back through the blog posts).

Once I decided what I was doing, this page came together quickly. I had a western themed photo page with the hat and hay bale. I used the Cricut to make the Happy Trails sign and the letters to indicate the next trip. I may use this technique again!