World War II Memorial

Our quick trip to Washington D.C. will go down in our family history as one of our best vacations - ever! The kids loved everything we visited. When Jim and I were ready to call it a day, Alyssia, with the boys' full support, would find another memorial to visit on the way back to the hotel. I have hundreds of photos of the monuments and then photos showing our families in front of said monuments. All three of the kids kept asking me to take their picture - it was this scrapbooking mama’s dream!

We did ask fellow tourists to take full family photo at some locations and this is one of my favorite family photos from that trip. We were at the WWII Memorial and you could see the Washington Monument in background. It was a picture-perfect summer day, and we were in an incredible place taking in the scenery and soaking up the history.

Scrapbooking Tips

I still have so many layouts to create for our Washington DC album! One of my challenges will be keeping up the patriotic theme while making each layout unique. It’s a challenge that I love embracing because it stretches my creativity and makes me think outside of the box.

Like most of my layouts, I based this on a sketch. I got this one free from Scrapbook and Cards Today and you can download it here. The original design showed flowers, but I altered it to accommodate a Stars and Stripes theme. I rotated it and instead of a flower border I used stars. To keep my stars interesting I stitched red and blue borders around the larger stars and on the smaller stars, even though it’s hard to see, I added some Diamond Stickles. The Stickles glitter glue added some texture and sparkle as a finishing touch.

My favorite element of this layout is the stitched border. One of the vacation layouts I had already completed was of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and I had used an Allison Davis We Create Class Kit. She showed us how to stitch a multi-colored border and I fell in love with it. I think it gives a whimsical look and it’s so easy to carry on the patriotic theme with red, white and blue. I’ll probably go back to this technique a couple more times throughout the course of this album.

When I got my photo placed, star border and title added, I thought the the page was still missing something. I had not planned to add any journaling. For layouts like this that will be in a vacation album I tend to skip journaling on each page and will added longer journaling blocks on just a couple of layouts.  As my final finishing touches, I added phrase strips from various Scrapbook Generation paper collections. I cut them down to banners and placed them diagonally across the page. The touches of black helped created a visiual triangle with the black letter stickers in the title. It was just enough.

I still have plenty of layouts to create, but I am looking forward to tackling the stack of photos from Washington DC and creating a special album.

Supplies Used:

Cardstock - Bazzill and The Stamps of Life

Striped paper - Simple Stories

Letter stickers - Doodlebug Deisgn, Inc.

Embroidery Floss - DMC

Miscellaneous - Stickles by Ranger Ink; Phrase strips - Scrapbook Generation