Road Trip : Utah to Pennsylvania
This has been a dream of mine for a long while. It all began 28 years ago at a Close to My Heart stamp party – a handful of stamps, a rainbow stamp pad, and some fine glitter. It didn’t take long until there were many, many more stamps, scrapbooking projects of every make and kind, taking and teaching classes, designing for a couple of scrapbooking companies’ magazines, mixed media, and so much more. I can’t imagine my life without stamps, papers, glue, watercolors, inks, etcetera, and creating clever and beautiful things. They all have a lovely memory tucked inside.
I believe life is about finding joy in the journey, which is something we did last summer…
Last June 27th my husband, Bryan, and I began a 3 week drive cross country and back. We took our sweet old pup, Stella Bella, to experience the beauty of this country with us. Stella is the sweetest, most loving girl. We adore her and we couldn’t go this far and not take her along, especially when going to see our little grandsons. They adore her.
This blog, in fact, is named after Stella Bella, who loves and lives with pure abandon. She is joy.
Leaving home, day 1.
Destination: Pennsylvania, where our son and his darling family live while attending medical school. We have been many times and it is a beautiful state. The people are warm and friendly, lots of trees and green valleys, and we love seeing so many little animals – squirrels, bunnies, marmots, all kinds of birds and much more. Something else I adore in the east is the fire flies with their cute little bottoms all lit up during mostly the month of July. Magic at its finest. I haven’t missed a July yet for this very reason.
Our road trip was amazing, cool, fascinating, extremely hot and humid (especially the south), beyond exciting, beautiful, and, by far, my favorite road trip ever. The emotions ran rampant. We saw 24 different states and a total of 6200 miles. Some were just a drive through, but, oh my, it was thrilling to see such a huge chunk of our country. Incredible amounts of beauty and an ample variety of landscapes. I loved the bright blue skies and huge white clouds. The high peaked mountains, wide-open prairies, Kelly green corn fields, the verdant South and wooded East. There is so much to see here in this God given country of America. It was something I would repeat in a heartbeat.
And Stella? Her favorite car ride ever.
We started in our home state of Utah – then moved onward to Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, PENNSYLVANIA & our darling, cute little grandsons (and their awesome parents), and, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, and HOME to Utah.
I’d been working on designing a project about our trip last summer to open this blog. #findingstellaroad Anyway, I watched the Tim Holtz Sizzix Everyday 2023 Collection release in January and when Tim introduced the Road Trip die I knew I had found it. There was a multiplicity of ideas for the dies use and the cutest makes. Plus, Jan Hobbins, a Tim Holtz designer, suggested using the carolers die for people to put in the car by turning them backwards – works great! (Don’t you love that cute white car with my husband, and me with Stella in the back?)
I began by dipping several different sheets of watercolor paper with distress inks in the many colors I thought I would use. Then I painted the back of the Large Etcetera tag with Walnut Stain Distress paint and let dry. I took a piece of paper from the Etcetera pad of paper and cut to fit the rectangular part of the tag. Next, I cut some hills to add to the bottom of the paper. After machine stitching around each hill and around the rectangular part I ran a walnut stain distress pad around the edges to age the papers, sewed them together and rubbed the same ink pad over the edges once more. Using Collage Medium matte, I attached the rectangular piece to the etcetera tag.
Using the different water-colored papers I had dipped in distress inks I cut out trees and cactuses, luggage pieces and letters for the UTAH TO PENNSYLVANIA title and hashtag #roadtrip2022. The clouds are cut from white heavy stock paper. I laid everything out and glued each piece on with the Collage Medium. The car is mostly cut from Tim Holtz papers except for the two white pearl colors of cardstock.
Something I was very pleased by is the road. I trimmed a piece of heavy stock one inch by 12 inches. Using a palette knife, I coated it first with texture paste and let dry, then I coated it with Distress Grit Paste Crypt. When completely dried I painted it with Black soot distress paint. I used a Permapaque yellow pen to draw the road lines. It looks like and feels so much like tar on the road that it makes me quite happy! (Silly what makes us happy.)
I stamped a few different things on greenish blue TH papers and placed them around the tag. For the road sign I couldn’t find a font to stamp or die cut small enough to fit ‘2600 miles/cross country’ and the paper was too thick to print on, so I used transparency which I always love to use. Over 26 years ago I started using transparency paper to type a title or paragraph of something I wanted in my scrapbooks. I felt quite clever when the scrapbook companies started selling transparency titles and such after that.
The title, UTAH TO PENNSYLVANIA, was adhered to some green TH paper which was cut to fit towards the end of the tag and edged in walnut stain distress ink. The hashtag was glued to another piece of TH paper in the same manner and glued as the end piece.
One of the last things to do was type the 25 states we visited (starting and ending with ours), cut out and glue to brown paper. The first one, Utah, I placed coming out of the tail pipe and then I glued the rest fanning out in three different arcs. Next, I chose two different metal word tags, tied red thread through the ends and glued one to the road sign and one at the bottom of a cactus. Finally, I used a piece of the Th tape designer and placed underneath the UTAH TO PENNSYLVANIA strip.
I am looking forward to this newest journey of mine and I hope you’ll follow along.
Products used:
TH Road Trip
TH Funky Cactus
TH Christmas cutouts
TH Funky Trees
TH Alphanumeric, Classic upper
TH Alphanumeric, Tiny Type lower
TH Enjoy the Journey stamp and die set
TH Field Notes stamp set
TH Etcetera Large Tag
Road
Watercolor paper
TH Distress Collage Medium: Matte
TH Distress texture paste, matte
TH Distress Grit Paste, Crypt
TH Distress paint, Hickory Smoke and Black Soot
Permapaque pen, yellow
TH Idea-ology Metal Word tags
TH tape designer
TH Idea-ology Paper Stash Etcetera Pad
Watercolor paper
TH Distress sprays and distress ink pads in different colors used to die papers
Red twine from my collection
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