By Brandon Hill on February 4, 2020 • ( Leave a comment )

2018: Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

In June of 2018 I headed out to California for a conference and my plane arrived a little early. I decided that I wanted to stop by and visit the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, which is located in Yorba Linda, CA, at the site of his childhood home. I took so many pictures at this engaging museum and collected quite a bit of ephemera – that I decided that I would make 8 pages to commemorate this trip. I used panoramic page protectors which fold out to allow a spread of four pages across. The spread above is the Title spread and opens up to reveal the 4 pages that show below.

I had a photograph that I took of the entrance to the museum printed in 8.5×11 size to put on the left hand page, and used a triple border on the round postcard logo of the museum on the right hand page. These extra borders help to make the seal fill the page and stand out a little more. I used a jagged edge tearing tool to create the rough edge borders on both sides of the spread, and I used my sewing machine to stitch the star border around the photograph and the right hand border.

The four page spread contains photographs of the museum, Richard Nixon’s birthplace, his grave, and the presidential helicopter. (You may want to click on the image to enlarge it so that you can see it in more detail.) The ephemera includes my ticket, the visitor sticker, and First Day Cover envelope and stamp that I purchased at the museum store. The picture of the large tree is a pepper tree which was there during Nixon’s childhood, and I picked up a several seeds to keep to plant sometime if I ever live some more suitable to a climate where it would survive.

This last spread comes after the panoramic set. I felt like I had so many photographs and items that I couldn’t fit it on 6 pages, but didn’t really have enough for 8 – so I used my Cricut machine to make the cutout on the left hand page which I found by Googling “Richard Nixon SVG” – It was too good to pass up. I also found his signature in an SVG form, and used a Calligraphy pen mounted in my Cricut machine to write it out – I think that it turned out pretty good.

The right hand page contains the brochures to the Library and Museum and to the gardens. Both are affixed to the outside of the plastic page protectors so that they can be opened to be read by the viewer. To finish out the theme of the entire collection I used my sewing machine to stitch the star patterns again on the borders of this spread.