Woo Hoo! I earned another Top 3 award from Lasting Memories!
One of the best parts of being President is getting to hand out the certificates and plaques to our Platinum Award winners and the Lower 48 Completion certificates. The Lower 48 award went to Pat who is a good friend of mine so it was doubly rewarding. We usually have the superintendents help with this award as well.
This page started out as a Fast to Fabulous page. I added a 4x4 photo in the bottom right mat area which left a small section that I filled with more stickers from the Junior Ranger tablet. I also added a border from the Club Scrap kit. These awards acknowledge a lot of travel to the parks so the variety of embellishments is a perfect accompaniment.
Our guest speakers included the local superintendent for the 3 Flagstaff parks, one of the rangers, and a Route 66 National Trust representative. I enjoyed all of their presentations. As I may have mentioned previously, the convention coincided with the 50th anniversary of the first landing on the moon. I was born just 6 days later and so it has always fascinated me. Our ranger talk included a discussion on how the astronauts prepared for that mission by using the rocky terrain at the parks to practice with their equipment.
Can you guess the method for this page? If you said "Wallpaper" you are correct! That Route 66 sign was the perfect art for our speakers. Adding the vinyl stickers we got from the Flagstaff parks rounded out the details of the talks. I journaled right on the page as well!
Saturday is the day for the big convention meeting. As president, I am the emcee. Here's a secret--we have a convention book that has the speeches all prepared!
These pages use the Under the Willow collection. I "earned" this by recruiting another consultant for Creative Memories (though it was nothing I did, the person just chose me!) The Western Region of the Eastern National Passport has green ink. For that reason, we had dark green shirts for the convention. So I went to my green papers and chose this theme for my pages. The page above is just a border maker cartridge along the top and mats for the photos. I wanted to add the Stamp pad but it was blending into the white cardstock in the pocket, so I mounted it on cardstock to give it a little contrast.
This year we had a special room for the kids during the meeting. One of our club members volunteered to host the room and she had games and projects for them so that they weren't bored with our "adult" meeting. They all seemed to love it!
For the back side of the pocket page, I mounted our name tags and ribbons on the same matching cardstock. While I used a different background paper for this page, it is roughly the same type of page with just a punched border at the top. I like my little decorative corner though!
Our group gathered in one of the ball courts for a ranger talk. I believe this is a reconstructed one as they were okay with us sitting along the edges. I had been up at the visitor center as people started gathering so I was able to get the top photo of everyone sitting around the edges. Once I joined everyone I could take some close-ups. Luckily we all share pictures and someone grabbed a shot of me sitting there too!
This is the reverse side of the Fast to Fabulous page shown earlier this week. There were still significant orange tones along the edge. The blue tones matched several of the shirts in the photos. The only thing I added to the page was the title in some small blue letters (that I believe I bought from Current many years ago) and some journaling. Fast to Fabulous indeed!
After the ranger talk, we had our group Junior Ranger ceremony back at the visitor center.
I print the groups as 8x10 size photos. I typically still trim a bit from the top and bottom but I need the width so that you can see all the faces. I'm 99% sure I followed a sketch for this but I can't find a copy of it. Still, it's pretty straightforward. If you calculate the triangle with a 6" side and bottom, the hypotenuse is about 8.4". Trimming the dark brown paper to that size square lets me rotate it to a diamond in the middle. The large photo then crosses that but you can still see the corners. When journaling on a dark color I like to use a white gel pen (not a chalk pen though--the letters get too thick). The Junior Ranger sticker is available from the visitor centers. I picked one up to use on this page.
After lunch, we had time to tour the visitor center and the site. This park protects an ancient Native American community (from around the 1100s!) There is some deterioration but that enables us to see inside the structures and the great rooms that they contain. Outside the dwellings were ball courts and other ceremonial sites. The rangers are quick to point out that this is not an abandoned village and that our responsibility to it is to preserve and remember the original inhabitants.
Let's start on the right side again! That is an older Fast to Fabulous page that had pre-printed photo mats. I liked that the orange color matched the tones of the dwelling rocks. I was able to use the 2 horizontal mat spaces (sort of) and trimmed another photo to fit in the vertical box. That left me a little room to journal. To create the left side of the layout, I matched the orange print with a half-sheet of printed paper as well as a laser cut strip that JUST fit the space on the bottom right corner.
The first thing we did when we got to Wupatki was to hand out the box lunches. There were a few tables but mostly people found seats on ledges or even on our coolers. It would be nice if you could find a bit of shade as it was very hot that day. I love when we can use a local caterer as the sandwiches, even when simple, are outstanding! And there were some different sides like fruit salad or potato salad.
This layout was created for my February 2020 class with Noreen Smith. That means you can't see the original sketch. What I liked about this layout was that I got to use another big square embellishment in a photo area. The papers are from an old CM kit that was a Memory Keeper's Club. The lighter papers have a botanical theme and the darker brown is more geometric. I never knew what to do with plain square stickers, but I think cutting them and using them as ends of the border was a nice touch.
