Longwood Gardens

Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania is a the most beautiful place to visit for a day. There are flower gardens, an indoor atrium with lovely rooms of all kinds of flowers, a fountain show and sometimes there is a fireworks display that is accompanied by an orchestra while the fountains are spraying.

My inspiration for taking these photos came from taking one of Tami's classes. The photos given to us for the project during the class was of beautiful flowers and I decided to go out and shoot every beautiful flower I could find. My friend Donna and I planned a field trip to Longwood Gardens to get the best floral photos we could and incorporate them into our page layouts. Although it rained that day, we were able to visit the inside gardens in the conservatory. It seemed like we walked for miles, but I don't think the conservatory is THAT big!  I have never seen such gorgeous flowers and arrangements of different kinds of flowers. They have rooms with waterfalls, roses, irises, etc. I could go on and on about all the types of flowers there.

Our 3rd photo challenge is on Brick Mosaic Moments grid paper. I chose the cornerstone (date) for my element on this page. This two page layout is done on page pattern #37. I reversed the page pattern for the second page to compliment the first page.

Page One of Layout

Page Two of Layout.

The cornerstone that I used on page one was a mustard yellow over a white paper tile. I wanted to bring in black as my accent color. So I tried to ink it, but you can see in the photo below the color was not even. So I used a marker to change it to black and then I placed it over a tile that I cut out of one of my photos. I think it gives depth to the cornerstone. I really like this technique. I saw this in one of Tami's pages in her book Designing Photo Mosaics and More on page 55. If you have the book, check it out.

Cornerstones

The title for this layout is Longwood Gardens I printed the tile on white card stock and inked the edges. I then mounted the title over a photo of water lilies.

Photo mosaics

The photo in the upper right hand side of the page is cut into five pieces. The top photo is the main photo. The next one underneath is the tile with the cornerstone date on top of it  below that I cut one inch squares out of another part of the photo. I did the same technique with all three main photos and the 2 inch square in the middle at the bottom. 

In this photo you can see that I cut the photo into three sections and placed the black accent tile in between the bottom two tiles and the main photo.

Architecture

There are some very pretty and interesting architectural elements at the gardens. Inside there is a fountain set alongside a carpet of greenery and flowers. It looks like a bronze metallic. There is another area in the building that has a garden bordering tile pavement with gentle spurts of water flowing from inside the garden. Here are two examples of the different architectural features. Close ups of these are below.

Water features

Here is a metal bird in the atrium. For the bottom two tiles, I used the bottom of the photo to cut my tiles.

If you are ever in Pennsylvania, make this part of your itinerary. You will be in photo heaven as I was.