National Museum of Scotland

I've liked the look of a collage of photos a lot the last few months, and since I've discovered Picasa, I love being able to print more than one photo on a 4x6.

The journaling here reads:

There was so much to see at the National Museum of Scotland, we could have spent all day there if we had the time.  The only section we toured was the Scottish section.  We started with a pictish tour., and then went to the beginning where Mary Rose watched videos about how the seas parted the land and glaciers melted, leaving lochs of salt water, etc. 

I was more interested in the historical items upstairs.  There was a replica of Mary, Queen of Scots’ casket, and the actual crib used for James the VII of Scotland, a.k.a. James the I of England.  There was a Viking grave, a hall devoted to coins, how they were made, and counterfeited, weapons, horns, jewelry worn by Mary, queen of Scots, and jewelry discovered by a man with a metal detector.. According to the tour guide, the slashes On the side of one if the standing stones are letters.  The fish-head looking items are war horns that only a few people can play; Sharon said that she has actually heard someone play a tune on one before.  It was very cool to see a loom where a tartan was being made.  It looks very complicated.  There were a couple of pieces of tartan on display that were worn by Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden which we visited the day before.  The mannequin dressed in tartan from head to toe looked very funny; it looked like an adult wearing a diaper.  The Kilt is much sexier. 

Edinburgh

The layout I lifted for this page can be found in Creative Keepsakes Volume 16 issue 6 page 30

I liked the jumble of the pictures, and the fact that some were vertical and some horizontal, and the fact that there was lots of room for journaling was a definite plus.  I used a small stamp that I'd bought at Micheal's a few years ago and created a stamped border at the bottom and used gold embossing powder on them.   I used a stitching template for the border around the top, stitched it with blue & white baker's twine, doodled circles around the little starburst designs, and then topped it with a blue gem.  The silhouette of the bagpiper was cut on my Silhouette SD.  I used a dymo label maker for the numbers on the pictures which coordinate with the journaling.  The simple title is from a set of stickers I picked up at Hobby Lobby.

The journaling reads:

Edinburgh is full of hundreds of years of history. These are only a few of the places we saw. 1)This was a very wide street which was formerly the Grassmarket, the place of public hangings in the 16^th century.  2) I’m actually not sure what this was, but it was one of the pictures we took on the way to the bus stop. 3) St. Giles’ Cathedral; we didn’t see the inside. 4)World’s End Close: it was named as such because many people who lived on that street never left it. They were born, worked, and died without leaving the street.  5) I had to get a picture in a phone booth; but was glad I didn’t have to use it because it smelled so bad.  6) Holyrood Palace; it was closed the day we were there which means that someone from the Royal family was staying there. 7) The North bridge connects the High Street with Princes Street. 8) I don’t know the name of this street, but we saw it several times on our bus rides. 9) We did a lot of shopping on the royal Mile. 10) A picture of the buildings and shops along the royal mile. 11) Edinburgh Castle on top of the volcanic rock.  This is the side where Greyfriar’s bobby came down. L 12) for a pound, you could get your picture made with this young man playing the bagpipes.  13)We ate at “The Filling Station” both nights in Edinburgh.  I did try a sip of scotch here the last night so I could say that I drank scotch in Scotland.  I didn’t care for it that much.  14) We had planned on climbing Arthur’s seat while in Edinburgh; but the weather was not cooperative, and we were tired by that last day…and knew we had a lot of walking for the Mary King’s Close tour that night.

Mary King's Close

The sketch I used for this layout is here.

The cameo is from Webster's pages. It and the flower were given to me by my friend Kimberly.  The bling flourish is a piece from a page of flourishes I bought at Hobby Lobby a few years ago.  The paper is by Me & My Big Ideas; it's their halloween collection which I thought was appropriate for a spooky picture taken underground. 

I cut the title from a survey card they have.  This is a large  photo, and I wish that they offered a smaller size, but it's one size, one price.  I could have scanned it and made it smaller for my layout; but then what would I do with the original?

The journaling says:

Hidden deep beneath the Royal Mile lies Edinburgh’s deepest secret; a warren of hidden ‘closes’ or streets where real people lived, worked, and died. We took a 7:2o pm tour and heard about murders, plague, ghosts, cattle, and sewage

Donna said it wasn't like any ghost tour she had ever been on before; but it was a lot like the ghost tours I've been on.  Guides telling the stories of the people who used to live here, with a reference to ghosts and experiences.

Meigle

The layout which I lifted for this design is in Creative Keepsakes Volume 16  Issue 4 Page 32

My original idea was to use the Celtic pp as the back-ground, but then the pictures got lost, and the pp got covered up, and there wasn't a clear delineation between the columns.  I settled upon using my Celtic stamps again to make the white space between the columns not quite so sparse.   I ruined a whole sheet of cardstock before I figured out exactly where to place the stamping.

The journaling reads:

Even though I was the one who had dreams of growing up to be an archaeologist, if it weren’t for Mary Rose, we might have missed this amazing display of pictish stones.  Sharon had called the Friday before and talked to Linda, the lady who takes care of the museum so that she was prepared to give us a detailed tour; what we didn’t realize is that it is in an old one-room school building, which was next to the cemetery where many of these stones were for hundreds of years. There are Stones which were at the entrance to the grave yard, head stones, and grave slabs which covered graves.  The meanings of the images on the stones are still open for interpretation.   Mary Rose touched some of them before Linda asked her not to.

Duntulm Castle

sorry for the poor scan.
We only had time to stop here due to the adverse weather conditions. It isn’t a big tourist attraction, and the path to the castle isn’t marked. There were two paths once inside the fence which kept the sheep on the cliff; Donna and Sharon followed the one leading to the left and down, Mary Rose and I took the one up the hill which I thought should lead to the ruins. The castle is unstable, and everyone is advised to not go in the fence surrounding it. I was heading to the castle when I saw the rainbow and then it started hailing. There wasn’t any shelter in the field and I learned that Hail, even the little pieces, hurts. It was a fitting weather condition for the day that started with a blizzard, then led to Mostly sunny, beautiful Blue skies, and had periods of rain . The only constant weather condition was wind.

Cemeteries

 

The layout I lifted for this one is in Creative Keepsakes Volume 15 issue 6 page 70

I considered replacing one of the photos with the journaling for this page, but decided to incorporate the journaling on the facing page:

We didn’t consider it morbid or creepy to visit cemeteries of strangers or undiscovered ancestors. There were a few things we considered interesting. About half of the cemeteries were next to churches such as this one at St. Mary’s church; the others were in the middle of a field with beautiful views all around. It was also interesting how some rooms were built to shield certain graves from the elements. These rooms probably had roofs at one time, but they disintegrated many years ago, and only the walls remain.

Baa Baa

The layout which I lifted for this design is in Creative Keepsakes Volume 16  Issue 4 Page27
I loved the looks of the layout I lifted, but wanted something unique to set it off.  I used my celtic stamps and embossed with white powder.  Then to connect them, I stitched with yellow and white baker's twine.  It kept me from having to decide between white and yellow.  I used Wild Honey distress ink on the yellow circles, and then on the white scalloped circles I used the Crushed Olive Distress Ink marker to doodle lines on it.

It didn’t take very long to see our first sheep. But most of the time they were fenced in fields. It wasn’t until we reached Skye that we saw some sheep roaming freely. I told Sharon That I wanted to experience a flock of sheep surrounding and blocking the car. She didn’t! The closest I got was 3-4 sheep crossing the road. We didn’t see many black sheep. But we were there in the spring, so we got to see several baby lambs. We weren’t the only ones enchanted by the sheep. There was a tourist on Skye that got out of the tourist bus and went through a gate and chased a sheep with a camera. Her tour guide Got out of the van and insisted she return!