By Brandon Hill on February 12, 2020 • ( Leave a comment )

2018: Cedar Springs Christian Retreat Center

My Journey to Washington was to participate in a Leadership Development retreat at the Cedar Springs Christian Retreat Center. This Retreat Center is in a beautiful location in Northern Washington, just south of the Canadian border. In fact a few of the participants went on a run one day and apparently ended up in Canada! The Retreat Center has a beautiful pond and gardens and amazing walking paths to enjoy. So, like many of the adventures on this trip, I took a lot of pictures! I had originally planned for this to be a panoramic fold out spread, but I realized that I had the LAX one right before this, and the Seattle Space Needle one right after, and due to the way the pages work I could not put the three spreads in order. So instead I decided to make 3 double spreads to showcase this experience.

I chose a green theme for the spreads due to the amazing greenery of nature that I spent 3 days in. I used Cricut Design Studio to recreate the Retreat logo, and then used my Cricut machine to cut out the design. You will notice that there are a lot of individual pieces to this design and I created a “How to perfectly place Cricut cutouts on your page” instruction resource page while building this spread. I used a jagged edge tearing tool to create the double border on the right hand side, and a Christmas Tree punch for the tree that is in the middle of the photographs.

The second spread shares some pictures that I took of an old railroad bridge that was one of two on the walking pathways at the Retreat Center. I had taken a 180 degree panoramic photo of the bridge while standing at the middle point and thought that it turned out really cool – so I had it printed in large format for this page. I continue the green theme on this spread to help tie the three spreads together. I used a double border on the panoramic photo to help it stand out a little more, and I used a jagged edge tearing tool for the borders on the sides of the spread.

The third spread contains pictures that I took while on an early morning hike up the mountain/hill on the Retreat Center property. I wanted to get some sunrise pictures, but also didn’t want to hike in the Dark. Since this was near the Summer Solstice and fairly far north I had to get up pretty early to get these pictures. The panoramic photo is from the mountain looking north into Canada, while the other pictures are taken looking down on the Retreat Center and of a pond on the trail. I used a light green border around all of the photographs to help them stand out against the darker green background paper.