Our first stop on our DC trip was to walk from our hotel down to the White House and have the kids get their first look at the White House! On the way we walked through Lafayette Square and approached the White House directly from the front for the best view!
After viewing the White House from the front, we walked around to the back side to see the back lawn and also the Ellipse, where we saw the National Christmas Tree. The Ellipse was blocked off with barriers due to the 4th of July, so we were unable to walk through but could still see across.
Since we were unable to get a White House tour, we did the next best thing and went to the White House Visitor Center. This very impressive visitor center had tons of history on the White House, a great interactive model with a virtual tour, and lots of artifacts from the presidents who lived in the White House. We all really enjoyed this visitor center and I would definitely recommend it.
The visitor center offers a Junior Ranger badge, so the boys both got busy on working on their booklets, and after completing a few pages, watching a short movie, and talking to the Ranger, they received their badges.
The supplies that I used for these pages were a combination of several different kits and paper collections that I had been collecting and discussed here. The color scheme for the entire DC album was based off of grey, white, tan, and black, with different accent colors mixed in on various pages. The only memorabilia included on these pages is the White House brochure and the Passport Stamps we picked up at the Visitor Center. I also included a photo of the Junior Ranger Badge.
Here are the final four layouts:
Thanks for looking! Our next stop iss the Washington Monument.
Last 4th of July we were in Washington DC for vacation, and we surprised our youngest son with a trip to Nationals Park. He is a huge baseball fan and our home team happened to be playing there over the 4th. Even though it wasn't the warmest day and we got quite a bit of rain that day, it was great experience and I had so much fun scrapbooking this. I took about a million pictures that day, so I'm quite proud of the fact that I only made 5 layouts for this!
We left our hotel that morning and hopped a cab to go to the stadium. My son didn't know where we were going, but kept asking along the way, and I kept making up different answers to distract him. When we pulled up, we couldn't see the stadium, just the parking garage - but there were these decorative baseballs all over it and he started to ask if we were at Nationals Park. As we approached the gate, we got our tickets out and showed him and he realized that the Brewers we playing! He was thrilled! Once inside, we watched the players warm up and the boys were both given baseballs that they later got autographed.
I created 5 layouts for this using a collection of baseball supplies by Moxxie called All Star Baseball. I chose this collection because it most closely matched the color scheme that I was using in the rest of the DC album, and I liked all of the red, white, and blue and star designs it included. It worked perfectly for baseball but also the 4th of July.
For these layouts, I tried to add in a lot of little details from our day, including our tickets, photos of the scoreboard, the flag ceremony, and the running of the presidents. I also printed out team logos and a logo from the stadium.
I'm quite happy with how these came out, and they are some of my favorite pages that I've probably ever made.
Thanks for looking! What is your favorite thing that you ever scrapbooked?
Last summer we visited Washington DC and were able to see the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. I didn't know a lot about this memorial or what it looked like before we arrived, and it ended up being one of our favorite memorials that we saw.
On our last day in DC, we walked the path around the Tidal Basin and stopped at all of the memorials on the way, including the MLK Memorial.
As part of my son's junior ranger booklet, we read through the quotes on the wall and he had to fill in the missing words on his worksheet. There were so many incredible quotes inscribed on the walls, so spent most of our time at the memorial reading them.
I created one layout for this memorial, and wanted to feature the statue and the memorial itself. I wish I would have taken more photos of the wall and the quotes and incorporated those into the layout, but I didn't take the photos. We were so busy reading and talking about them that I didn't think to take pictures of them. So I worked with what I had and created this layout:
Thanks for looking!
After completing the other Washington DC cover page with the map the other day, I started working on the cover page for the second album which will be an itinerary page.
I decided to keep this page really simple, and just created a chart in Word with the attractions we saw each day. I tried to keep it to the main attractions - things I will be doing layouts for in the book, even though there were other smaller things we saw each day. I usually add some sort of photo on my cover pages, so this time I thought I'd try it without and just keep it simple and clean.
I added a journaling card for a bit of decoration, and added the DC punch-out card at the bottom to over up some other words that were printed on the background paper that I didn't want to be visible. I mounted the itinerary on a piece of tan cardstock to match the journaling card, and added a few grey photo corners that I made from an arrow punch.
After typing up and printing out the chart, this page only took me about 15 minutes to put together. It's simple, but it works.
