Configurations for Compendium

How's that for a mouthful?! Linda is giving us two weeks to complete the latest Compendium of Curiosities II challenge. So this is week 11 and 12 combined. As always, the challenges are based on the works of t!m and he and the wonderful Mr. BTS, Mario are also sponsoring this fortnight challenge with an amazing t!m Holtz goodie bag full of prizes. This challenge can be found on pages 33 and 34 in CofCII.

I bought this Confugurations box over two years ago. And it's sat. I didn't really know what I was going to do with it and was waiting for inspiration to strike. And when Linda said this was the week for the box, I knew inspiration HAD to show up! I had the wooden "J" and "S" letters (for John and Sue!) so that was my starting point. I covered the J in foil tape and distressed it using my t!m Craft Scratcher and a pen. Then I painted the whole thing using Claudine Hellmuth Charcoal Black and quickly wiped it off. For the S, I covered it in a scrap of blue and white dotted cs since blue is my favorite color, then distressed the edges of it. Then I was at a loss of what else to do. So I sat the box on my side table and stared at it for a couple of days. Finally, lightning struck! I would do different places we had been on vacations through the years. We've been able to take some great trips over the last 24 years. We have many happy memories of the trips we've taken.

 Completed box

 Japanese Torri Gate. I made this out of a Kraft stick. Painted close to the same color as the one at the entrance to Miajima Island. John's letter "J" and my letter "S'. Marie Laveau's Voodoo Potient represents New Orleans.

 Wasted away again in Margaritaville can be no place else than Key West, FL! The Great Smoky Mountains, one of my favorite places on earth. Grand Tetons in Wyoming.

 Bison represents Yellowstone National Park. "Vacation" definition taken from an old dictionary. And below it is Chippewa Square in Savannah, GA and the "Forrest Gump" bench. Turtle is for Grand Cayman Island and the turtle farms where they raise Green Sea Turtles to return them to the sea.

Bridge of Lions across the intracoastal waterway in St Augustine, FL. Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. Coke bottle for the tour we took of the Atlanta, GA bottling plant and Jack Daniel's label for the tour at Lynchburg, TN.

The End

This was probably the hardest part of our vacation. James G. Dunton was John's cousin who was killed in Vietnam in 1959. James was one of the first casualties, and thus, his name is on the very first panel. So many brave men had their names placed on this Wall after him. Too many.

And this is the last of the vacation layouts I'll be sharing.

It's Magic

I have one thing to say. If you want to spice up your scrapbook pages, you owe it to yourself to buy the new Magic book! Every technique I try, I fall in love with. And I wonder why I didn't think of some of these ideas years ago! Talk about your light bulb moments!

This uses a simple 3 x 12 piece of cardstock that is scored and folded. Then you attach matching cs and papers and your pictures. Keep it closed with a simple ribbon. (And yes, I cut my page protector so you can open it!) And you've got 5 more pictures on a page than you would have ordinarily! I also made another Pinwheel like on the CardPatterns post as an element on the page.

Jefferson Memorial

This is gonna go down as another all-time favorite layout. The more I use the new larger Flip Flaps, the more I love them. Makes the pages so much more cohesive when all of the pictures are on the same page. At least that's what I think!

We bought a copy of the Declaration of Independence while we were in DC, so that is what I used for the mat on the main pages. Most of it is behind the statue of Mr. Jefferson and the signatures are behind the two pics of me.

I found some more buttons in my stash, so they too have been incorporated. This uses the layout Magic Act from the new CTMH Magic book that is available for purchase TODAY! And yes, the stitching is real!

Xcellent!

This layout is of the different pics John took when he went on his "Xcellent Adventure" while I was Conventioning. I found some old chipboard buttons and re-covered them in Passages scraps to match and am using up yet more of my hoarded stash! I know. Big shock! There's also some CTMH designer brads.

Taking in the sights

Using another layout from Magic and the single Flip Flaps. These pics were of various things we saw that I really didn't have enough pics of any one thing to make a full layout of each individual thing. So I grouped them together and I like the final outcome. Still using up those old embellishements! I'm actually getting low on letters, so I combined some for my title. And if I hadn't told you that, you'd thought I did it on purpose!! I like the "eclectic" look of it!

Ta Da

Using the name of the layout in Magic I used as inspiration as my title! While it started out frustrating when I could not get the template to download on the new 'puter, turned out to be a fun layout once we figured out that I cannot download PDF files with the free "trial" version of Microsoft Office. So we ended up downloading the file on John's laptop. The swirly doo-dad that the title is on on the first page is the template that gave me so much grief! But darn well worth it I say! I used the bricks in the Around The Block stamp set for my Brickwork title. The embellishments are from very old, long discontinued CTMH Dimensional Elements. Not that I hang onto or hoard supplies. No. Not me. I could probably never buy another thing as long as I live and STILL have stuff left when I die.

Honor

More pics of Arlington. Again, not a lot of "extra" stuff on these pages. The pictures speak the words.

Arlington

For this layout, I for the most part, let the pictures speak the words. It is such a sobering thing to watch the changing of the guard. I didn't do a lot of journaling and I didn't add a lot of embellishments. Now that I've used the new CTMH Flip Flaps, I LOVE them even more than I thought I would. I wanted the impact of the changing of the guard on a two page layout. I didn't want it spread out over five or six pages. The Flip Flaps helped me accomplish that. This is one of my all-time favorite layouts I've ever done.

National Harbor

Here's another layout from vacation. Pretty self explainatory!

Vacation layouts

Been working on a couple of different projects to be revealed in a bit. In the meantime, here are the beginning pages of vacation layouts. I'm using CTMH Passages paper pack and various embellishments. Some I know what company they came from and others, notsomuch! If there's something in particular you want to know what it is, leave me a comment or drop me a line and I'll try to figure out what it is! One thing I will say is that the title for the "Sand Art" pages, I used old Scenic Route chipboard letters and sanded them, then went out back and got some sand out and after randomly adding Glossy Accents to the sanded letters, I dipped them in the sand! I thought that was the most ingenious thing I've come up with in a long time! It takes a lot for me to impress me and I did on this one!

Perfect Day part 3

This is the last layout from the Perfect Day workshop. This one is based on CTMH Imagine layout called Understudy.. Most everything is CTMH. Only exception being the large square

t!m Holtz Fragment, the quote which is from the scrap store in Pigeon Forge, the picture of the old-timey couple which is from my stash and the Ranger Crackle Accents I put on the couple to make it look older still. To me they looked like the type of people who would have had a summer house in Elkmont back in the day!

Moving on.................

Perfect Day part 2

This is the second layout from the Perfect Day pack we got at Convention '08. This layout comes from CTMH Cherish and is called Color Celebration. Most everything again is CTMH. The mask, clock hand and breathe charm are all t!m holtz. Photo turns are from my stash. The quote is another that I picked up at the wonderful scrapbook store in Pigeon Forge, as is the "t" in the upper right corner of the second page. Title is Gin-X rub-ons.