National Parks – candy scraps

Wow! Time sure does fly!

Between deadlines, not feeling well, starting up a business, teaching and working on projects I cannot share right now, I have not only neglected my blog, but I forgot to share the mini book I made for my mother in law on Mother’s Day!

My mother in law loves to travel and she enjoys visiting National Parks all over the country. So, I thought it would be fun for her to have a book that listed all of them so she could record when she visited.

The process took a little longer than I anticipated, since I couldn’t find a list of all of the parks online. So, I went through the National Park Service’s website and copied each state’s parks into a Word document. That ended up being 500+ pages long!

So, I deleted photos and descriptions and formatted all of the text, which took me down to around 200+ pages.

Obviously, I was not creating a book that long, so I deleted all of the National Monuments, Historic Trails, National Lakeshores and other things included and focused only on National Parks. Then my book was a manageable 13 pages long and I could cope with that!

Then, I went through and grouped each of the parks by the area they were located in. So, all of the parks in the Pacific Northwest were together and those in New England were together, etc.

My final lists looked like this …

I then went through and created an index page with a tab on it for each section. I used a variety of stamps and quotes with a travel theme to decorate each one. Here are a few examples:

Most of the stamps I used were from Studio 490 (Wendy Vecchi) or Tim Holtz. They both have great sayings and the images were perfect.

On this one, I also included a die cut tag from Tim Holtz.

Each index page lists the states that are included in that section.

I covered the insides of the cover with map paper from My Little Yellow Bicycle. the index pages, cover and accents were all made with a very old line of paper that I love from Cloud 9.