The Shirts on Our Backs

This post is going out on New Year's Eve. I hope you all have had a wonderful holiday season and will be ready for more of my National Park Adventures in 2025!

Our club made the difficult decision to cancel the in-person convention for 2020. There were too many concerns about Covid and large groups (and I'm not entirely sure we'd be able to get into our hotel rooms). The first thing the club did was to encourage our members to take photos of themselves in prior convention shirts. A photo at a park was ideal, but if not possible, just a picture in the shirt would suffice. I wore the New Bedford Whaling shirt and posed in front of the house during the week.

This layout is based on this sketch.

I'm playing along with Lasting Memories, and their challenge for this week is to base a layout on a sketch. That sketch is from 2021, so I've been holding on to it for a while! I didn't use the "polaroid-style" mat for the photos as I turned one of them into a journal box, which would have looked a bit odd. This paper is from "You Got This," which has a great set of tie-dyed papers. The tones connected with that orange-ish shirt, and the embellishments included more modern teen vibes, like the cell phone. But I like the way they all connected perfectly!.

On the Friday before the convention, I chose the Flagstaff shirt from the year prior (it's what I would have worn at the convention, of course!) I wanted to do more than photograph myself in my yard, so I walked a block over to the Grey Stone monument. We live near where William Penn signed the treaty with the Native Americans for what is now Pennsylvania! The closest I got to a National Park was the Trenton Barracks--part of the Crossroads of the American Revolution trail. The gates were closed, so I could just peek above the fence and see the tops of the barracks. That's why I got my photo with the sign. Although I was outdoors, other people were around, so I had my mask on in that photo.

For this layout, I followed a sketch I had used once before (not shown in the blog; I used it for one of my Lighthouse Challenge pages). For December 2024, I've enrolled in Tammy McEwen's end-of-the-year challenge. She brings back sketches from the CM blog throughout the year so that we finish pages matching the year (this year, we will finish 24 pages if we do them all!) (Inspired by a Creative Memories sketch and #TammyMcEwen #Tammys2024Challenge) The paper pack is Happy Camper. It didn't include journal cards, so I used a couple from a pack I won at a non-CM crop many years ago. I think they were from Close to My Heart, but I can't be sure. I chose a border punch rather than punching individual circles for the border. If I wanted more pop (though this particular page is fine), I could have also added more circles under the decorative arcs. Because the background paper is so busy, I chose to mount my photos on white mats, making them easier to see.

Monumental Discoveries

Our visit concluded with a walk along the flight path. Four flights were made that first day, each slightly longer than the last. Each landing point is commemorated with a granite marker and the flight details.

This layout is based on the CM virtual crop from November 2024 (Scroll to sketch #3). I knew this was the perfect match when I saw the sketch and the 4 monument photos! I chose papers and embellishments from the Wanderlust collection. You may be able to see the details of the burgundy paper. Not only does it match the tone of the bronze marker, but it also has lots of numbers in the print. That was also a perfect fit for the photos! While the airplane embellishments are much more modern planes, the sentiments are the same.

Campy

Back toward the visitor center are a few replica buildings that showcase how the Wright Brothers lived at Kill Devil Hills. They started by sleeping in tents and using the structures for storage but soon realized they needed to escape the blowing sand, so they added more buildings with living spaces.

This layout is based on one of the CM Worldwide Virtual Crop Sketches (scroll to #12). I liked that this sketch used a lot of horizontal photos. I doubled it so I could get them all in. The papers are from the "Moments and Memories" pack. I liked that there was a black paper with white dots and a white paper with black dots. The contrast of the 2 on top of each other in the middle was one of my favorite techniques. I found a few remnant stickers and accent pieces in my stash and added them across the bottom. I don't typically mix fonts, but I wanted "Home Sweet Home" and didn't have it all in one sticker, so this sufficed. There are 2 non-CM items across the top row. The Wright Brothers sticker is from a piece of Echo Park State papers (the backs are a mix of journal boxes and decorative cards). On the far right is a Graphic 45 journal box.

There Are Two Sides to Every Layout

While we were at the statue, we posed for a group selfie. We were a bit far from the memorial statue at the top of the hill, but we could see it better with a bit of zoom in the camera.

If this layout looks familiar, it was one of my bonus posts, as I played along with Lasting Memories again. (The link is here.) It will also give you some background on the sketch used.

The right-side layout was made to coordinate but didn't get posted simultaneously. However, the topic was slightly different, as I was venting my frustration with people who do not abide by regulations. Whether it's a COVID precaution or basic crowd control, it doesn't matter. I get very frustrated when I see people ignoring signs posted by the rangers. And this time, I just had to scrapbook it. 

The previous page was made with the Summer Denim and Feeling Bright pages. Since nothing was left of Summer Denim, I pulled some similarly colored and patterned papers from Feeling Bright for the coordinating page. Of course, the orange photo mats and the thin border at the bottom were the same papers. I found the "Covidiot" sticker in a pack of Covid papers and stickers from PhotoPlay. 

Just Plane Fun

In July 2020, Jim and I went on vacation with my sister and her husband. We had planned the trip before COVID-19 and decided to keep our reservation for a beach house. While in the area, we decided to visit the Wright Brothers National Memorial while maintaining appropriate social distancing and masking around others (even outside for me, as you just couldn't be too careful). After getting our entrance sign photos, we drove to the large statue commemorating the first flight, and the camera used to capture the historical event. 

This layout is from one of the Paper Loft classes I took at the Lancaster Scrapbook Convention. The green strip of paper on the left is a pocket where I stashed the journaling box and a small card with the image of North Carolina (not from Paper Loft, but it matched well!). I added a few words and enamel dots to round out the layout. I thought the "Anything is Possible" quote was particularly relevant to this layout.

Homeward Bound

I'm sure you all had similar feelings during Covid. Since we were homebound during the first few months, we would do ANYTHING to relieve our cabin fever and feelings of monotony. So in April 2020, on National Junior Ranger Day, some friends and I vowed to complete a Junior Ranger booklet for one of the National Parks but to do it from home. I had the Junior Ranger book from last summer's trip to the Grand Canyon, so I pulled it out and completed it. I emailed the rangers and told them I would send it in for verification, but they didn't need me to do that. I was pleasantly surprised in June when I received an envelope with my badge and a lovely postcard from the ranger!

I debated the background for this page. I had been making a lot of Covid-themed pages, and that was what I had looked at first. However, since this is more about the Grand Canyon, I decided to pull this sheet of texture paper from the Creative Memories Leave Nothing Behind collection. The postcard took up a lot of room, so I wanted to keep the photos smaller. They did need to be matted, though, because the background paper was a bit "noisy." I chose blue to match the sky portion of the paper and the journal box. The stickers on the journal box are from the CM Covid paper pack (Love Each Other 2). Because the paper was so busy, I didn't need more embellishments besides my "time travel" arrow.

Visiting for Spite?

I was pretty upset by the treatment at the Christmas party at Gateway NRA. So, I decided to go to a different park to make myself feel better. Paterson Great Falls was about an hour away--not terribly close, but since I had quite a bit of daylight left, I made the trip. I started at the visitor center to get an overview. The town's claim to fame is that it was the first PLANNED industrial city. Who planned it? His name is Alexander Hamilton! The falls and the Passaic River provided great power to turn wheels, creating everything from cloth to locomotives. You can still walk across the falls, as seen in my photos below. It was freezing, and the spray coming from the water chilled me to the bone. I returned to the visitor center to warm up before exploring the rest of the city.

This layout is based on this pin (and doubled). I found a sheet of brick paper, which I split to cover the bottom of the pages, and decided on the blue stripe for the vertical elements. I decided to include several photos of the falls--peekaboo pockets to the rescue! I have 2 of them layered and chose to use a waterfall technique in honor of the falls. That means that each photo is layered a bit ABOVE the underlying image. The last embellishment set was made of stickers from the musical Hamilton. Someone at work sent them to me anonymously, and it became the perfect fit for this page.