Bonus post--What Sharp Teeth You Have

Hello all! I'm cropping this weekend and took time to post for the Lasting Memories Challenge #675--Thankful for Die Cuts. This layout is part of a long vacation I took in September 2018. I am on an air boat ride in the Everglades and in addition to the great landscapes and flowers, we saw lots of Alligators! You can see in the bottom right photo how close they came to the boat! You'll see more of this trip in a few months.

I based this sketch on an October 2023 CM Virtual Crop challenge. I'm using up an older pack of CM papers and embellishments called Cool Serenity. I loved the die-cut leaves in the pack and it was a great match for the edge circles in the sketch. The border across the middle of the pages is one of the Border Maker cartridges. I thought the grass journal card matched even though it's probably supposed to be more for sports and front yards. In this context it certainly matches the sea grass.

2018 Convention Part 8--Arty Facts

Before we get to tonight's layout, I wanted to let you know that soon there will be MORE of my blog to enjoy. I have so many layouts made and waiting to be shared that I'm going to add a Tuesday drop each week. And you never know when I'll be participating in a challenge that will give even more bonus posts! Hope you are enjoying this! Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts about the blog.

And now back to our convention trip!

The museum has the most impressive display of scrimshaw. There are cases and cases of everything from decorated busks (used to go inside corsets) to cane toppers and even the musical instrument fret! Amazing what you can do with bones and teeth. I think I could have stood in there for hours just looking at all the items but we had to keep moving to get to the convention setup.

This layout is based on one of the Virtual Crop challenges from September 2023. Scroll to Sketch #5 to see the design. I used some texture pages for the 11" square. Although it's oyster shells, I thought the pattern resembled the scrimshaw. Using a dark background and another lighter tonal paper to sandwich the shells helped to keep the paper from overwhelming the layout. I used a light gray to punch the rope borders and added just 2 clusters of stickers and word art. The tonal paper was light enough that I could journal right on the page.

The last stops on the tour included some period clothing. I love this dress! The museum details who wore it and how the dress changed as it moved through the hands of several family members. We also had a chance to step onto the balcony to see the harbor. Imagine that it was filled with whaling ships as it would have been in the 1800s!

This layout used the same virtual crop, but this time was Sketch #10. While the sketch calls for banners of 9 and 3 inches, you won't get any space between the 2 parts. That's why I trimmed them to 11". To ensure that all of your banners match, stack the papers and cut them all at once. I flipped the pages so that my vertical photos were on the left. This is a very versatile sketch. You could use all vertical or all horizontal--just duplicate the layout suggestion for that side.

2018 Convention Part 7--A Whale of a Tale

 As part of the board, and this year as president, I've found that during conventions there is so much to be done for the meeting that I don't always get a chance to explore and visit as much as I'd like. This year we made a special tour time of the Whaling Museum just for the board and the volunteers. This was early enough that we had time to set up after the tour and still look at all the amazing displays. Entering the museum, you immediately get a sense of size as you look up and see the large Right Whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling. The photos on the left page show you this from 2 angles. The inner skeleton is a baby whale. And look closely at the left photo--that's an accurately sized heart model on the floor!

I made this layout to complete one of the CM Sizzlin Summer Challenges. You can catch the replay on this YouTube video. I created this page while I was on the 2023 Convention trip! Have any of you scrapbooked while traveling? I've learned a few tricks for packing and selecting items that will allow me to take a bag of supplies to just about anywhere! But I didn't have a tag punch with me. No problem, I cut the decorative pieces along the bottom row with a trimmer and then notched the top 2 corners with the 2-way corner rounder. Now they looked like a tag! It was one of the tips I got from Noreen's video.  You'll see the sketch that I followed for the right-hand page in the video. By adding a mat to the middle photo spot I had plenty of journaling space. Doubling the sketch allowed me to add the brochure on the left.

We had a tour guide, which was great as that kept us on pace to see the museum and still finish in time to set up the convention. She took us to a room where there was a full-sized whaling ship! Yes, it was a huge room but at the same time, I kept thinking that the ship was too small to catch a whale!

This layout was based on a sketch from the September Worldwide Virtual Crop by CM. Scroll to sketch #6 to see the design. I also completed this layout while traveling, but this time to the Corrigan family beach house in September. In fact, I was able to complete a dozen more pages that week. I would secure a space for myself at the dining table after dinner and complete a few pages when we had a quiet evening at home. You'll see here that I also doubled the sketch to create a symmetrical 2-page layout. I again used a mat card to fill in for one of the photos (once on each side). The papers came from several nautical-themed packs I had but still coordinated nicely!

2018 Convention Part 6--Religious Freedom

Touro Synagogue in Newport was the next stop on the bus trip. This is designated as a National Historic Site but is not one of the NPS units, most likely because it is still an active congregation. The history of the community is one of perseverance and faith. I do recommend taking the guided tour to hear the entire story. The most notable occurrence in the congregation's history is their concern for religious persecution after the colonies won their independence. Their letter to Washington and his reply is reprinted today to demonstrate what religious tolerance should be for everyone. Copies are available in the visitor center. When I visit active houses of worship, regardless of the faith, I tend not to take a lot of interior photos as it can be considered disrespectful. In this temple, they did ask us to refrain from photos until the end and to take photos only from the rear of the building. The vertical photo on the left page is my photo. The remaining images are all postcards that I bought in the gift shop.

This layout is based on one of the CM Virtual Crop sketches that I saved. The paper and stickers are from a Judaic pack that I purchased from CM a few years ago. When it was first sold, two of my fellow advisors held a class to help those unfamiliar with the Jewish faith to understand what the designs were and why they were included in the pack. I'm very glad I took that class as I felt much better choosing the papers and stickers to correspond to the sketch. Now the red matches the photos but is really supposed to represent pomegranates for one of the holidays. You don't see the fruit on the tonal paper so I think it worked well for a non-holiday layout. A special thanks to the Rabois (friends of mine from the NPTC) who also looked over this after I completed it and assured me that I did not inadvertently make a faux pas on any religious icon usage.

2018 Convention Part 5--Sew what?

One of the highlights of the tour is the machine shop. Not only was water used to power the looms, but to run all of the power tools as well. And the tools were HUGE! Saws and drills the size of a human body! That one water wheel turned a series of pulleys and drives so that the power was portioned to where it was needed. 

You might remember this layout as it was posted for one of the Lasting Moments Challenges. Refer to this post to refresh your memory of the layout. Oh, and Jim says he was definitely NOT loafing 😁.

My last stop was in the weaving rooms. I had never seen such complicated looms. They could make argyle patterns, tube-shaped cloth, and a wide variety of other sizes and shapes to fit the needs of the everyday housewife or workman. And again, it all worked thanks to the water power nearby. I wonder if we will return to that as a power source for industry with the problems we have with fossil fuels. Not that there were no environmental issues with water, but at least it didn't produce as many air pollutants.

I'm fairly certain I followed a sketch for this layout, but I cannot find a copy of it. I do know that the papers are from the Paper Loft Euphoria collection. I had saved the diamond papers specifically for these pages as I wanted to highlight the argyle photo. I made this at a crop in Lancaster and while I had taken the rope border maker cartridge for the nautical aspect (those pages are coming soon) it certainly worked for the weaving room as well! The embellishments are mixed from several different collections.

2018 Convention Part 4--What Once Was Modern

 Our bus trip headed to Pawtucket, RI to see the Slater Mill. This is one of the large weaving mills found along the rivers in the Northeast. They've gathered several buildings into the complex and we split into a couple of groups to take a guided tour. 

I created this layout based on an idea in my summer class. I saved this photo from when I originally posted my take on the challenge but I have added punched fence borders along the bottom. I didn't have them with me at the crop when I made the pages. I used Eureka papers from the Paper Loft. The word art is theirs as well but the rest of the embellishments come from an older Croptoberfest pack.

The site covers the history of the area for several hundred years and shows a variety of daily life examples from fancy houses to worker houses. One thing I learned here is that tea was shipped in decorative bricks--there's a sample on the table on the left page. I just assumed everything was loose but it made more sense to compact it to save space. They also went into the weaving process before industrialization. 

The challenge I mentioned above created remnant arcs, so the second part of the challenge was to use them in a follow-up layout. I added a couple of laser-cut borders to finish the pages and more of the Croptoberfest stickers.

2018 Convention Part 3--Well, Well, Well

On Friday Jim and I participated in the club's all-day bus trip. These events are a standard part of our club activities now and offer a way to get to some far-reaching park sites with minimal environmental impact (1 bus rather than 58 cars for example). Our first stop was the Roger Williams National Memorial. I had confused him with Will Rogers and kept thinking this was someone who "never met a man he didn't like". No, Roger Williams is the founder of Rhode Island. The visitor center is sort of small so we split the group in two with one half staying at the site and the other half touring the state capitol up the street, then we switched. My state capital pages won't be part of the blog, but the building itself is quite interesting.

In the visitor center, we watched a movie on the founding of the state. Supposedly he chose this site due to a natural well supplying water for the colony. There is a well in the courtyard but it is symbolic. Roger Williams built the colony on religious tolerance (after getting kicked out of several other puritanical villages). This was even earlier than William Penn's similar concerns when founding Pennsylvania. It's also a premise that found its way into the Declaration of Independence. Truly remarkable and historic.

I made this layout during a summer challenge class. The handout did call for 3 different double-sided pages. I ended up with 3 papers but with the same designs so there was less variety in my cuts. So when I made the layouts, I decided to use them a little more symmetrically, creating wide bands stretching across two pages. The papers are from a very old Croptoberfest kit but I liked the striped paper and floral design. I thought they went well with the garden photos and the heavy yellow presence in the interior photos.