a couple 'real' scrapbook pages!

and now, for a few 'real' scrapbook pages, to go along with my latest Project Life layouts! I want to keep up with Project Life to have a slice of our 'day-to-day' along with random things, but I still do like a well-designed (or not, lol!) 12x12 scrapbook layout. I finally decided to scrap photos of a Labor Day weekend trip we took to Las Vegas in 2009.

I decided to include a couple 'on-the-road' pictures as sort of a 'title page' for this section of layouts-- This was my first view of Joshua trees; they remind me of something out of a Dr. Seuss book! The picture of Tom was taken right over the state line into Nevada; I was sort of amazed to see the poker machines right in the gas station, but I guess when gambling is legal, everyone has to take the opportunity to get some $$ out of it.

this is a close-up of the upper right corner; the stickers are October Afternoon's Boarding Pass line of papers; it's full of really cute travel-themed things. I'm not really 'good at' that whole 'layered embellishment' thing that's popular right now, so this is about as layered as I get on my pages.

this is a picture of the entire 2-page spread. I got the background papers and stickers (Las Vegas themed) at a scrapbook store we stopped at on our way into town... yes, of course I planned that, haha!! The scrapbook store was our first stop, actually; I found out where it was before we left, and we planned our route accordingly. (Tom was pretty nice to accommodate that, for sure!) And since then, these papers and stickers have been knocking around in my craft room, so it feels good to finally use them, before they got lost forever (in the abyss).

the left-hand side: Since this paper is one of those 'photo' designs, I didn't want to cover up too much of the famous 'Welcome to Las Vegas' sign (besides which, I didn't get a good picture of it, myself). This page is a couple pictures of 'people we met' including a couple impersonators on the street, and Tom getting to meet Corey and Chumlee at the Gold & Silver Pawn shop (which was pretty cool, by the way!). It also includes a photo I took of the street pretty late at night, still filled to the brim with cars and people. 

the right-hand side: again, it's a pre-printed themed paper, so I didn't do much embellishing. This page includes selected photos of things on the strip; my take on Las Vegas was that it was crowded, noisy, dirty, and pretty much 'all for show' so that's what my layout reflects. The photos are all 'fake' things: a fake volcano, fake Paris, fake New York city, etc. If we go back to Las Vegas again, I think it will be to see a show or to see more of the city / area than just the strip... neither of us gamble, and neither of us like large crowds, so spending time in and around the casinos on the strip is kind of pointless.

This layout is one of several I plan on doing to showcase some of our favorite Christmas ornaments. Both Tom and I have a collection of ornaments from before we met, and since we've gotten together, we've started buying ornaments when we go on trips. It's a really nice way to remember the trip when we're decorating the tree. This layout is based on a Scrapbook Generations Sketches for Scrapbooking sketch that I modified slightly to accommodate larger photos. At first I didn't really like the gold paper I used, but after adding the stars, I do like the way it turned out.

A closer look at the left-hand page-- the stars were cut on the Cricut electronic cutting machine; I don't have one of these machines yet, but the Scrapbook Cottage has one, and my fellow scrappers had quite a selection of cartridges with them for the weekend. They were nice enough to let me borrow them to cut whatever I wanted. The star design is from a military-themed cartridge of shapes; in addition to soldiers and planes, the cartridge included some really nice stars, badges, fireworks, etc. 

An even closer look at the page- the journaling strips I included on this page. I hauled my typewriter with me to the cottage for the weekend, and I actually used it a lot for journaling! Since I write kind of big, I really like being able to include more text, and the 'coolness factor' of the vintage typewriter hasn't worn off yet... lol!

...yes, I think we WERE crazy... Part 2

On Sunday, after we had a leisurely (and very delicious!) buffet breakfast at the Monte Carlo hotel (we took a cab this time, to save our feet- and our moods!), we headed back to Arizona. We had hoped to beat the "holiday traffic" since we were traveling on Sunday and not on Labor Day... but, no such luck: at this point, we were still at least 5 or 6 miles away from the Hoover Dam (and a security checkpoint, which is where most of the traffic backup came from). Tom actually put the car in Neutral some of the time, and just coasted/idled. It was pretty annoying, but the scenery was beautiful though- miles of hairpin turns thru the mountainous terrain- and, if we had been going faster, we would have missed seeing this guy:

This bighorn sheep was strolling along right next to the highway... quite a surprise! We always see those "watch out for wildlife" signs when we're driving but never end up seeing anything, so I was quite happy to see him- he's a pretty nice specimen, too- he has a pretty nice curl to his horns.

Once we got to the Dam and parked, we headed for the Visitor's Center where we decided to take the guided tour-- we actually got to go down into the Dam and see some of the workings. The tour covered the history and building of the dam (it was built between 1931 and 1936, and was finished ahead of schedule and under budget!), and was really quite interesting. This huge generator room (650 feet long), which is somewhere around 500 feet underground, houses the turbines on the Nevada side of the river-- the scale of this equipment is almost incomprehensible. The American flag is hanging from one of two huge cranes that they use to move the equipment if they need to service it. What you see in this room is the very top of the generators; the electricity is generated below what you can see, and the water actually flows thru below that still (I still don't quite understand how it all works, but it's amazing, when you stop to think about it- the fact that moving water can generate that much electricity).

This photo was taken from the outdoor area at the top of the Visitor's Center- again, the sense of scale is almost incomprehensible-- there are teeny, tiny cars passing over the top, but it's still hard to understand how big it is-- 45 feet thick at the top, 660 feet thick at the base, and 726 feet high. (I think they should put a mannequin down at the bottom, to give visitors a sense of the size-- we were also wondering how many pairs of sunglasses and cameras are down there...LOL!)

This photo isn't the best, but it's another one taken to show a sense of scale (once this bridge is done, it will span 1,080 feet.) Obviously, since the current highway is 2-lane, has a lot of switchbacks, and goes right over the top of the dam, there are a lot of traffic problems. This photo shows the arch that will support a new 4-lane roadbed, so eventually traffic can bypass Hoover Dam altogether. Unless you want to tour the Dam, of course- I would definitely love to go back again sometime, but we'd need more time next time, since we still didn't get to see everything we wanted. We made it back home about 10 pm, which makes for a "total vacation time" of 40 hours... Not even two entire days (!), but we've certainly figured out how to pack a lot of activity into those short amounts of time. It was a fun weekend, and I look forward to doing it again sometime soon. (just not on a major holiday weekend!)