Welcome to The Cherry On Top.
Today, I'm showing off some old pages I designed many years ago from a trip to Monschau, Germany. I quickly looked through the blog and could not find anything on this album I scrapped. Shocking! Hehehe...
The main reason I'm showing these off is to write about my latest trip to Monschau that I took, last week. As you may know, we travel quite a bit and I'm often doing research on where to go. Looking up places and what's to do there. Often, I can't find enough information. So, I thought I'd start blogging our travels so that others can get a better idea of the area and decide if it's enough.
Above is a fairly simple page with two lovely pictures of Monschau's high lights, the river running through the village and fabulous architecture including fachwerk. Monschau is a very charming, old, smaller village not far from the Belgian border. You can walk through the village in a few hours. It's full of shops and restaurants that are open in the warmer months, but much to our disappointment, closed in the colder ones.
We were there towards the end of November and nearly everything was closed. Some of the cafes/restaurants were open. Though the village is full of shops, nearly all of them were not open. That being said, it is still worth a visit.
Here's a close up of the cluster.
Below, I cut some designs from a design paper. My skills were a bit limited then.
The temperatures were much warmer for the trip I'm showing off. Just wait until you see the next installation!
In the pictures above, is a nice square with all of those tables. We went to that restaurant shown on the bottom. The prices were pretty good and so was the food. Flosdorff has a typical German menu and there's quite a lot to see when you're sitting inside. We were watching people set up the Christmas market much to our dismay. We missed by one week!!! Grrrr...
The page above and below are side by side or double pages.
Look how simple the pages are. Square shapes, some layered text boxes and that's it.
The colors are mimicked on both pages lending to cohesion and uniformity.
I love the black, bordeaux and beige. They are classic colors which I thought fitting for such an old village.
All year, you can find plenty of places that serve drinks and sweets like beer, gluhwein, apfelstudel and caffe.
The title on the page below is kind'a cool. Note the contrasting colors for poppage. These pics are actually from Butchenbach, Belgium. The area of Belgium that used to be Germany.
Mmmm...pretzels! My favorite and fresh baked, too.
Below, you can see the fachwerk. I wonder why they don't design houses like this any more? Personally, I find today's architecture exceedingly unimaginative, boring and flat out ugly. The mental stimulation of beauty and craftsmanship is sorely missed, but in the alt stadt, Munschau.
Through the photos you can see that there is plenty of nature in and around Monschau. If you're into outdoor sports like hiking, hunting, biking, etc this would be a great place to visit. It's quiet. There isn't a lot of anything around this area which was exactly what I wanted.
Another simple page with contrasting matting and the same color palette. Look how the text boxes stand out against the busy background.
The red house is worth a gander, too. It doesn't cost much to visit. You can stroll several rooms, tastefully decorated from centuries ago. The theme is fabric because they used to make it there. There's only a tiny bit of history to learn and it doesn't take long at all to go through it. They close over lunch!
If you don't have a lot of time, keep your pages simple. Above, I simply rounded the corners of my photos with a punch, cut a few strips of paper and used a huge paper flower with a button center and done. Easy, right?
I designed a large pocket for my last scrapbook page so I could put all of my ephemera in it. I cut around the fun design of the paper and adhered it around the three sides. For pretty pages, use repetition and don't introduce too many colors and or patterns.
I threw this blog post in this spot because I got the dates mixed up for the Love for Templates train. I thought it was this day, not the Friday after. Duh! Hehehe...
Since it is Friday, I did come up with a fun freebie for ya. I'll have another one for the second part of the Monschau posting. Ya have to come back and check it out to see the difference between spring and fall visits. It will take your breath away!
I made a fun, easy digital page and I'm sharing the cluster with text, Germany across it. You can click here to download it.
Make sure ya come back next week for the regularly scheduled blog, the train, the chicken freebie and more.
Keep looking for the second part of the Monschau post. It really is a magical place no matter what time of year you go.
Thanks for stopping by the blog. Happy travels!
