The End of the Trail

My next trip was in the fall of 2013 to my cousin's wedding in Portland Oregon. I traveled with my mom and we had some time to go sightseeing between the various events. One morning we headed to Oregon City and found the museum that represents the end of the Oregon Trail. This city is where pioneers would have to register their land claim so all of them had to come through here even if their destination was farther west. This isn't part of a national park, but does have a passport stamp (at least it was supposed to, I only got a bonus stamp).

I started this page using this layout. I found some free cuts for the Cricut and fashioned the cowboy, cowgirl, horse and wagon from various shades of cardstock. The wagon wheels turned out a little thin but I didn't feel like re-cutting them. The layers of desert and mountain were made with 2 shades of brown shaped with a tearing tool similar to this one (though with a bit of a rugged edge instead). You can also use a q-tip lightly dampened with water to create a path to tear paper.

In the Hills of Shiloh

Sunday morning before heading home we stopped in Tennessee for a ranger talk at our host park--Shiloh National Military Park.

I have used this technique before and I think it is especially useful here. I took one piece of 12x12 paper and cut it in half vertically. I mounted each to the outside edges of the two pages and then used the inside area for mounting photos, journaling and memorabilia. The journal box is one of the pieces from the Eastern National scrapbook kit, and was the epitome of this layout! The remaining blank spaces were filled with some random Civil War stickers from other packs.

Also at Shiloh is a national cemetery, very similar to Arlington. I didn't explore too far, but did find a few notable headstones. I also completed a scavenger hunt so that I could earn the Civil War trading cards. This one seemed to fit the page so I added it with photo corners.

This layout is another in the stash-busting course I am taking (the February edition). Again, I cannot post the actual sketch, but the paper cutting uses one entire sheet of 12x12 paper. I actually used remnants from 3 different papers from the retired CM Archivers pack. I hope they bring something similar back as the papers are very useful for my travels. The top left corner is another vine sticker. I tore it in half and layered it into the corner to get the angle. The fence is a single punch from a border maker. I wanted to fill the gap under the title and took inspiration from the iron gates to the cemetery.

Newsworthy

We made the newspaper! On Saturday we held the convention in a meeting room at one of our hotels.

For the news article, I found a background page that was newsprint. Oddly enough it came from a tablet of Christmas papers. I had a couple of 5x7 photo sleeves to preserve the actual newspaper. Creative Memories products are great at protecting from the high acid content found in newspapers. Keeping them in these protective sleeves will prevent decay from leaching to other parts of the page. I'm hoping it also keeps them readable for many years. You can also scan newspaper and use photos of the page to keep stories.

On the right page, I used my handy sketch seen in previous weeks but used only the left hand side. I only had the 2 photos (one of the convention and one of the hotel welcome sign). I used my nametag and a journal box for two of the right hand elements and then dug out a tag and used a couple of ranger stickers from the EN pack as an embellishment.

Contraband

On Saturday morning Jim and I drove to the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center. The path from the parking lot to the front doors is strewn with cast bronze items reminiscent of items found during an archeological dig. Inside the center are exhibits about how freed slaves struggled to begin a new life after emancipation. The term used for those refugees at the time was "Contraband".

Do you recognize the layout? If you look closely it is the 1-2-3 sketch I've used in each of the past few weeks. This time I squeezed a journal box between the left side photos, and used 2 full 4x6 photos on the bottom right. The paper is not actually double sided. I chose 2 scraps of black and white patterned paper and cut them to the sizes of the sketch. I added a few antique stickers and some ivy for the upper right corner. Since the items along the path were of such variety, just about any sticker I owned worked on the page.

While at the center we had 2 ranger talks. The first one was a musket firing demonstration in authentic wool uniform. In Mississippi. In July. Brave man! (Though in all seriousness the weather was quite mild). When done, he changed into his NPS uniform and talked about battles around the city.

Since the primary theme is the musket firing demo, I pulled out the musket paper on the right as well as other gun stickers. The left page was in a similar brown tone and had pre-pasted blue and dark brown paper. To be able to see the "Ranger Talk" stickers, I mounted them on a piece of vellum. The background still shows through but the letters stand out. When adhering vellum, Creative Memories makes a great adhesive that turns invisible when rubbed to adhere to the page.

Snatches of Natchez

After our tour of Brices Cross Roads we drove down to the Natchez Trace Parkway visitor center. In addition to a ranger talk about the parkway we took a stroll on the nature trail which leads from the parking lot. In that way we could visit 2 parks at once!

This layout uses a 1-2-3 layout from Noreen Smith. The paper is an older CM pattern called "Enchanted". I thought the florals and dots worked perfectly with the items available for me. This is another instance of not having any real photos. On the left page the top two images are cut from one of the brochures of the area. On the right page I supplemented the unigrid with a journal box and a decorative mat (the banners were actually on the mat!) Since the unigrids are so dark, I decided to pep them up a bit with red photo mounting corners. I only had 4 so by using 4 black and alternating them, both unigrids were mounted.

We have come to a cross roads

We arrived in Mississippi and joined a club tour of Brices Cross Roads. This is a very tiny site of federal land but we toured the state and local sites as well.

This may be one of my least inspired layouts ever because it is just brown wallpaper. I only had a few photos of the grounds so I chose to open the unigrid so that the full picture shows. To balance that I chose some die cuts of a canon and swabber for the right. Since the photos had a lot of green and blue I didn't mat them on the page.

At one of the tour sites was a cemetery with graves of the civil war soldiers. Very little of the remaining battle sites are "photographic" but there is a recreated bridge that I captured.

For this layout I chose to play along with a Scrapbook.com sketch challenge. There are discussion boards where crafters challenge each other and the monthly 2-page sketch featured hexagons. I chose gray and black and then looked at the yellow lettering on the graves sign to choose the yellow as the 3rd design element. (There's 2 shades of gray so really there are 4 design colors). I punched my little hexagons with the CM punch from several years ago and it was a little hard on my hand to get them all. I just punched a bunch of each color and then started making the design in the upper left corner. By ensuring that colors alternated throughout I painted a path to the lower right corner and repeated the process on the right page. The tombstones on the left page are cut on the Cricut from a halloween file. But since we're talking historic graves, they fit in well. A few other stickers from my Civil War stockpile completed the pages.

Among the tree tops

We drove further into the Great Smokies with the intent to climb Clingmans Dome. We did it!

On the left is a remnant of paper from the Best in Show pack from CM. Although it's made for animals, the paper is quite useful for many layouts and the clouds were especially useful here. Along the bottom is a sticker border I wanted to use. I was surprised to find that it was really 3 stickers, but they went together so nicely I left them stacked (bottom grass, road and mountain). I added the words "scenic route" to a sign sticker and a vellum car. To me, tht border encapsulates our trip up to the hiking trail. On the right is a page I had originally intended to use for a Girl Scout page. The trees and brown tones also matched the scenic view.

I won't lie, the hike--although short--is strenuous because you start at a higher elevation and climb up another 1000 feet or so. I had to stop often to catch my breath and that's why I chose to have a little fun with the photo of me reaching the top (while gasping for breath).

Still, it's not that I want to highlight that photo so I covered it with a Peekaboo pocket and put the journaling on top. Then on the inside I found a decorative mat that also captured the thrill of the climb!