Connie's WHAT?

If you are an NPTC member going to the convention this year, here is a preview of the book you will see! There are more layouts in the album than you will see here on the blog since I'm only featuring the National Park pages, so don't miss it!

The next 10 weeks are going to highlight a trip made in July 2012. The NPTC national convention was held at Apostle Islands in Wisconsin and I decided to drive there and back instead of flying. I planned to take a couple of days to get there and a couple of days to drive back, so a week on the road total. I tried to get Jim to come with me, even planned a trip to a HUGE air show in Oshkosh, but nothing would convince him. He said, and I quote: "I am NOT driving to Wisconsin!" As I planned the trip and the stops I would make, somehow Jim started calling this my "Northern Migration" (I guess due to the destination at the top of Wisconsin). Well, the name stuck and I used it in my journal and now in the scrapbook. So here is the kick off page for the trip:

My page was inspired by this page. I tried using large ovals instead of "free handing" the mountain cuts and it was only partially successful. I definitely manipulated the stickers to spell out my title but I think it is acceptable. The word "Wisconsin" and the state shape were both cut on the Cricut from a free file I found online.

My first stop was in Ohio at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. This is nature in the middle of urbania but thus provides a great escape for those living in the area. There are lots of trails to walk and rivers to navigate. I confined my visit to the historical part of the park which covered the making of canal boats and commerce in the area in the 19th century.

The left page is my itinerary. I didn't realize how extensive it was going to be, so if you look closely you'll see the layers of journal paper as I kept adding entries. As I did for the cruise, I used stickers as bullet points for each day of the trip. One of my postcards came in handy for this page as well (I do like to augment my photos with postcards).

The right page is a fast to fabulous page with just plain green background (matching the left wallpaper) and 2 tan photo boxes. I think the Unigrid works well in a photo box space. The journal box was cut to fit between the photo and the page edge.

Inside the first visitor center were displays of how the canal boats were made and models of the area as it appeared when the boats were in service.

The left page is the reverse of the fast to fabulous page. This was just a beige page with some postage stamp cancellations. I matted the photo  and other than journaling, I didn't add much to the page. The right page is wallpaper found to match the beige of the left. I liked the design at the top and thought it represented a ships wheel.

My next stop was at the historic railway in the park. I didn't take time to ride the train because I needed to get to my first hotel stop at a reasonable hour. I did tour the historic depot with manager's office display.

I am rather proud of myself for this page. I like the antique feel of Graphic 45 papers, but they are so detailed they rather intimidate me. In 2017 I signed up for a year of classes at a local scrapbook store and we used a Graphic 45 kit to make a year of pages (one for each month). By learning how they worked with the papers, I struck out on my own for this layout.

I have a tablet of the "Come Away With Me" papers, now discontinued, and I used that for this layout. I used one of the map-looking papers as borders for the left and right edges. I cut train borders from one page and used the reverse side with blue, brown and pink papers to mat photos and the decorative die cuts. I found both the blue trunk and brown train on a separate page and added them in. A stamp with a train was also on the matching sticker sheet I owned. The brown border under the trains at the top is made with the Creative Memories Scallop Burst Border Punch. I thought it looked a bit like train wheels. It's not nearly as detailed as my classes, but I'm quite happy with the result!

Along the Mall

My next page is just a few random monuments that I went by on my way back to the Metro. The top left photo is John Paul Jones whose statue is in a very busy traffic island. To the right is the World War Memorial for DC and of course the bottom is the Washington Monument. I liked the sunset look here too. In fact, it is probably just me turning 180-degrees from my picture of the Lincoln Memorial in the WWII reflecting pool.

The page was created from this challenge on the Creative Memories Blog. Although I didn't participate in that virtual crop, I do save all the ideas in my Pinterest folder and often come back to do them later. I liked the easy way I created the background. This actually allowed me to use some of my 8 1/2 x 11" paper because I could cut off strips and layer them into a "V" on the page. Once the pieces were in place, I trimmed off the excess at the edges. The title is a die cut from the Eastern National scrapbook pack. Then I just had to mount the photos and journal and it was done!

This ends my DC trip, but next week I will highlight a trip to Wisconsin!

Another stop at WWII

It's just before Memorial Day, so a perfect time to post this visit to the WWII memorial.

Until writing this blog, I don't think I realized how many times I visited the WWII memorial. It may actually be a higher visit count than Independence! Coming off the Tidal Basin, I had to go past this area on my way to the Metro station, and so it's always nice to stop. As the sun was setting, I couldn't take many photos, but I did like the sunset view of the Lincoln Monument over the reflecting pool. Of course I had to take a photo of the Army Air Forces symbol as I remember my grandfather who served in the war in that branch of the military.

When I found this paper, I KNEW I had to use it for the WWII memorial. The wall on the other side of the reflecting pool is filled with stars representing those who died during the war. I mounted everything on black to set it off from the field of stars. The unigrid even got mounted on black cardstock. The bottom of the page is another black strip of paper with a border sticker of stars from Paper House's Washington DC cardstock stickers. Above that is a die cut of the WWII memorial from the Eastern National.

A New Monument

After leaving FDR, I headed to the newest member of the Tidal Basin--MLK. The monument is fairly straightforward, but very profound.

For this page, I wanted to do something to highlight the "moving lines" on the statue in the bottom left photo. That's why I chose striped paper and turned it to the side. With a little judicious trimming I was able to get all the components into one 12x12 page including the unigrid, a journal box and a decorative sticker (from the Eastern National scrapbook pack).

The Roosevelts

After leaving the George Mason memorial, I made my way around the Tidal Basin to the Roosevelt Memorial. Never having been there before I accidently entered at the end and viewed all the rooms backwards!

I didn't really know what to do with my lone photo of Eleanor, so I decided to give her a solo page. The background is one of the Gallivant fast-to-fabulous pages. I rooted through my Eastern National materials and found the die cut of Eleanor and the 5x7 card on the left. I suppose the card could have been a photo mat, but I thought it also worked well as a journal box. The same image of Eleanor is on the card so I thought it worked well.

OK, on to FDR. The monument is divided into rooms representing his 4 terms. Each is filled with symbolic statues and some sort of water element.

The left page is the back of the fast-to-fabulous which I really liked. To make a match on the right I found a piece of gray paper for the bottom and a red and gold remnant for a top border. The yellow mat under the photo also helps to pull the page together. The mat under the photo of me and FDR was chosen for the pale green paper which reminded me of the patina of the statues.

One of the most moving sections was the room featuring the challenges of the depression. Apologies for the blurriness of the photo, I had an issue with lighting.

For this page I used the new Archivers paper from Creative Memories as well as some older retro stickers from the early days of Creative Memories. I thought the brown tones went well with the rugged looking statues.

Thomas Jefferson and George Mason

Happy National Scrapbook Day! As this is posting, I'm at a weekend scrap to celebrate the event. Creative Memories began this day many years ago on the first Monday in May.

This layout is part of my visit around Washington DC and I wanted to walk the Tidal Basin. I had never been to any of those memorials and I was excited to see them all. Each one will get its own post on the blog, so stick with me over the next few weeks to see them all.

First up is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. What an enormous statue! It's a beautiful memorial with text of his famous documents engraved on the walls. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the photos. Not sure why they came out so blurry this time.

This layout was created with what Creative Memories calls a "Project Recipe". I have the original PDF version, but you can see the idea page here through a pin on Pinterest. So, you'll notice there's no blue in my layout. That's because I used paper from the Imagine paper pack. I wanted the black and red colors as this is a very bold set of photos. The contrast color of yellow actually threw me for a bit but as I look at my creation, I'm liking it more and more. I changed some photos for the unigrid, one for a die cut of a camera, and one for a journal box. Like page sketches, the project recipes are starting points. Make the layout work for you, don't try to jam your photos into something that doesn't tell the story.

Very close to the Jefferson Memorial is a little known memorial for George Mason. He was instrumental in assisting with the creation of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Definitely a forgotten hero.

This layout was created from a sketch. The idea is to use one piece of double-sided paper and cut and arrange it to highlight 3 photos. Here is the sketch. As you can see, I turned it 90-degrees to the left because my photos were oriented slightly differently. The red paper and striped paper are the same page, just 2 different sides. The stars are a border sticker that I thought worked well. I didn't use as many stickers as recommended, but I don't see any "bare" areas that concern me.

Great Falls

In May 2012 I traveled to DC for a surgical technology convention. In my spare time I visited a few parks. My first trip took me back to the C&O Canal on the Maryland side (where the Great Tavern is). We had been here the previous August with the NPTC convention. This time I was able to find the trail to the falls, and it made for a completely different visit.

This is a wallpaper technique. I used a piece of older Creative Memories paper from a travel kit. I liked the way the design looked like falling water. This is just the right hand side of the layout because the left focused on my convention activities, so I actually posted the end of the trail first--the falls. But that gives good context for what comes next. One notable piece to this page is that I used photo corners to mount the unigrid as I usually do. However, I had 3 made of black paper from my stash (older than 8 years I think), and since they didn't detract from the unigrid, I used them. I couldn't use the 4th one because it would have partially covered the title--so I used one clear corner mount in the upper left.

The new part of my park experience was the walk to the falls. It was an easy walk across planked wood for the most part but took me past some very nice plant and animal displays.

The left page of this layout is also wallpaper. I toyed with the idea of cutting out the left edge as a border but decided I liked the all blue background. I tried to match it on the right with some blue and green mats in the same shades. The right border is another scrap of paper in blue tones. I layered the stickers at the top and bottom onto dark blue paper to make them pop and used a corner rounder to try to match the shape of the stickers. A little dragonfly in the middle made for a pleasing symmetry. And on this unigrid, since the bottom has some color, I used all clear photo corners.