Westward Ho, 2012

Last summer for about 30 days, my mother and I drove a 5,500 mile trip out to Yellowstone Park and back to Maryland. We packed the car, said goodbye to my husband (who hates road trips, we picked him up on our way back in MN), and were off laughing with excitement like two school girls.

We love going West.  It is an unexplainable feeling we get, we just have to go West.  This trip left us with many memories of the places we visited and the people we met along the way.  We took hundreds of pictures between the two of us.  I put many of the pictures in a book I made through  My Publisher.com

Mom having fun with a sulpture on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, NM.

This is a church in New Mexico.  Mom took the picture while we were driving in the car.

We happened to be at the right place at the right time to get this pretty picture of the The Grand Tetons reflecting on a pretty calm lake.

Timing is everything!  What a shot of  Old Faithful with the sun reflecting on the mist to form a rainbow.

One of our favorite things to do was to take pictures of each of the state signs.  It gave us something to look forward to on some of our "long hours on end" drives.  If there was no traffic around, we would slow up considerably to get the picture of the sign.  In  Photoshop Elements, I cut out the backgrounds from the signs and them pasted them onto one of our maps I had scanned showing our route.

We really did drive the whole circle outlined on the map.

The big question was how do I display my pictures to relive that fun summer.  Do I make an art quilt or do I make a scrapbook quilt?  Well the scrapbook quilt idea won.  It allowed me to incorporate the above picture into it as well as another picture collage I had made along with some memorable single photos.  The background is made from fabric I bought from a quilt store in Taos, NM.  The flower button was bought at another  store in Taos.  The bead embellishments, and the bangle necklace, and other charms were chosen from a box of trinkets that belonged to my Aunt whom we had visited in Oklahoma.