The Gang's All Here

Welcome back to the 2021 NPTC convention and to our Friday Night Picnic! The bus tour ended with a stop at Glen Echo Park. It is one of the portions of the George Washington Memorial Parkway, and is a great destination. It was a leisure destination for Washington, DC, during the early 20th century, and it still has some ways to relax. The historic carousel is here, and you'll see that in a future post. We used the pavilion to host our Friday night picnic (a tradition for many years now). One of the rangers shared some information about the park, and we had plenty of time to catch up with our friends. I have photos with some of my favorites — many of whom I hadn't seen in years!

This layout is based on a Club Scrap free sketch. They post the sizes and cutting guides, making it easier to assemble. The papers came from an old CM patriotic pack. I liked the vibrancy of the designs. You can mix patterns by using a large, medium, and small one, so it doesn't feel too overwhelming. I started using dark blue gingham paper for mats, but that proved overwhelming, so I switched to navy cardstock, which helped create a clear distinction between the photos and the prints. A few stickers from the stash, and the page was done!

Down on the Farm

We are back to the bus tour at the 2021 NPTC convention. After leaving Fort Washington, we drove to the nearby Oxon Hill Farm. The parking lot is a bit of a distance from the farm, so they set up the stamping table at the end of the parking lot, in case anyone didn't feel like making the walk. But Mel and I did walk over to see the animals. Several cows were in the field, and again, there were a plethora of chickens roaming around. They don't seem to be afraid of people at all and think we are all going to feed them because they roam around our ankles the whole time. It was pretty hot that day, so mostly I sat at a table in the shade and talked to some of my park friends. It was a lovely, peaceful stop.

This layout is loosely based on this pin that I saved. I pulled my Farm stash from the shelves and found that I had a portion of the fence border with the chicken on it. Additionally, I had die cuts left from other kits and old CM that included the chicken on the title square. I strung all of that along the bottom of two papers that had red tones (one was supposed to be a barn wall — can you tell there's a window in the middle?). Layering the photos and Unigrid was pretty simple once the borders were done. There is journaling in a peekaboo pocket that sits on top of the chicken photo.

Lasting Memories Guest Designer week 1 (Night tour golf carts)

Hello everyone! I'm guest designing for Lasting Memories throughout September! I'll be sharing an extra layout every Sunday at noon for the next 4 weeks. Each one follows the weekly challenge posted at Lasting Memories, and I encourage you to join the challenge! Post your version using the link at the bottom of their post.

For today's post, we are going to jump ahead in the 2021 NPTC convention. On my last night (Monday evening), I took part in a Night-time Monuments tour. We were escorted around via these extended golf carts. I'm glad I didn't have to sit backwards on the end, otherwise the carts were GREAT! They could take us right onto the monument areas, which saved us some steps and time. I highly recommend this tour if you head to DC.

Each week, Lasting Memories challenges us to incorporate a specific design on our papers. This week, the theme is Polka Dot paper. The challenge I had was FINDING polka dot paper! I finally located the yellow with white dots in my Birthday stash. The rest of the papers and embellishments come from the CM Imagine and Magic Awaits packs. I knew that the colors in those packs would match the carts perfectly. For the design, I turned to Cheryl Even's sketch #12. You'll see that it originally was a single-page sketch. I just took the sketch and mirrored it to create the double-page layout.

Sounds of Freedom

As I promised in the last post, here is the Fort Washington Cannon Firing event. I always enjoy seeing these, and by now, I understand the various steps. You can see from my photos how far away the reenactors were from the crowd. These photos were taken with Zoom to allow me to see more details. You can also see in the top horizontal photo that there is a small box well behind the cannon. This is where the ordinance is kept, and there is quite a production of someone being told to fetch it, taking it out of the box and putting it in a satchel, and then walking the few feet to the cannon, where it is removed from the satchel and fired. The boom is always a loud shock for me, even though I know it's coming.

For this layout, I wanted to utilize the black shadow border and die cut I bought for Civil War pages. The border includes horses pulling the cannon, and the die cut is the rammer. Again, brick paper would work against the photos, but a dark red paper (I think this is called cinnamon, and it's the last 2 pages I have of this color) gives the impression of brick without the distracting detail. To add a little military flavor, I chose the old CM border maker cartridge, Chevrons. I punched them in navy blue cardstock and then placed a bronze shimmer piece behind it to make the sergeant stripes. A few items from the stash provided the titles. I used the new ivory write strips for journaling to make it easier to see on the page.

Up Against a Wall

This post continues our discussion of Fort Washington during the 2021 NPTC convention. The tour included lunch and a cannon firing demonstration. You'll see the cannon next time. We grabbed our box lunches when they arrived and tried to find a bit of shade to eat. There were no picnic tables within the fort grounds, so we formed a line along one of the walls that offered some shade. This is another location with a LOT of stamps, so they put tables out in front of the commander's house for us to do our thing. That's the bottom right photo. 

This sketch is based on a sketch that CM provided to advisors. When we offered more Theme packs (which consisted of a couple of printed papers, a sheet of cardstock, and a sheet of stickers), they wanted to share ideas on how to use them to create pages. You can view the sketch here, and if you click "visit site," you should be able to download a copy if you haven't seen it already. I used the Bedazzled collection for these pages, along with some brighter, more patriotic papers. One sheet of paper is split across the bottom of the page. Another paper is cut at 5" and 1" twice and then layered on top (using both sides of the paper). The border across the middle is a brick border punch, and it picks up the walls in the photos perfectly. I had actually toyed with brick paper as the background, but honestly, the images were getting lost. The sketch shows some 3x4 pictures at the bottom left and right. I chose to make a couple of banners for each side as decoration. 

A New Slant to the Fort

Today, we continue the 2021 NPTC convention in DC. The next stop on the Friday bus trip was to Fort Washington. Two of the park's more interesting features have little to do with the military fort. In the layout below, you will see the Eastern Cedar tree that is growing at a slant. It makes you look twice to decide which of you is on more solid footing! Another reason to stop at this fort is to visit the Fort Washington Lighthouse. I've featured that before, when I participated in the Maryland Lighthouse Challenge. The planned bus stop didn't allow me enough time to walk down and see it up close again, but I could see it from the fort walls.

To make this layout, I chose to use a sketch from Cheryl Even's work with Split Coast Stampers. I wanted to use this as a kick-off page, as I knew the remaining photos would all take 2 pages for the story. I used Sweet Blossom for this page. You may not notice it right away, but the papers are all 11.5" long. That creates a 1/4" border around the layout. The background is beige cardstock, so it's a subtle difference, but I like that it isn't too garish. I needed to trim the 4x6 journal box to fit the space, so I ended up cutting one of the corners; however, it didn't impact my ability to journal.

Please Stamp Politely

Today's post is the last entry for the Frederick Douglass stop on the NPTC bus trip. This is more about the club and our members instead of the site, though. Stamping is an obsession with some of our club members. We like to find and stamp all the variations of a stamp (all caps? mixed upper and lower letters? with a period after D.C., without a period after DC? Those little details are important to us). Frederick Douglass has always been a site with a considerable supply of stamps (as of this posting, there were 18 different stamps available in the visitor center). With over 100 stampers converging on the site, they wisely moved all the stamps to the front yard where we could form a line and get our images. I wish I could say that it was orderly. As I was trying to get stamps (and trying to logically keep them all separate from what I had and hadn't used yet), people in the line behind me were reaching over me and moving the stamps about as if I were not even there! I know I'm not the only person who has experienced that, and it saddens me to see that sort of behavior. If you are a club member, I urge you to act politely and responsibly when visiting our 433 (current) units. The staff will appreciate it, and so will your fellow club members.

This layout was supposed to be another bonus post, but I goofed up on the directions. The June challenges at Lasting Memories focused on using a series of specific paper sizes when creating a layout. For challenge #755, it was three 5" squares, three 1.5x5" strips, and three 2" circles. I noticed that one of the designers had used three squares and three strips to create a block in the middle of the page. I started there but moved the pieces around a bit more and used the strips as borders. I filled the top and bottom of the page with borders (a set of 3 star banners in red, white, and blue for the top and half of a boot border punch for the bottom). The papers for the 3 squares came from a 6x6 paper pad in my Patriotic collection. I struggle with those pre-cut sizes, but I was happy to be able to use them in this manner. I added my journaling to the page and photographed it as DONE. And when I went to post my link, I realized--I forgot the circles! So I  couldn't post the layout to the challenge, and I wasn't interested in going back and trying to figure out where to add the circles. So the most we can say about it is it was INSPIRED by the challenge. It's still one more page done in the album!