New Kit - Homestead

For months I have had a kit floating around in my mind but haven't quite had the time or inspiration happening at the same time to complete it.  Finally now I can announce the arrival of Homestead!  The layout about was created using an almost 100 year old photo from my Johnson family.  The older woman is my great, great, Grandma Hilda Augusta Landgren Johnson, who immigrated to America from Sweden in 1887.  She lived in Michigan where her men worked in the iron mines (as they had done in Sweden) until she got tired of worrying about all the mine disasters.  She gave her husband Jakob Gustaf Johnson an ultimatum - they leave mining or she leaves.  So they packed up everything in 1904 and traveled to Washington State.  There they had a small farm in the community of Jorden.  Their 2nd son was my great Grandfather.  The younger woman in the photo is her youngest daughter, Naomi Dorothy Johnson Priddy, who sadly in later years was left a quadriplegic after a car accident.  In this photo she is still a young teenager and the women are standing in the corn field to show how tall it has grown.  When I scanned this poorly damaged negative and saw their faces - this was a treasure!

Homestead Digital Scrapbook Kit is available at Heritage Scrap.  Here is what I had to say about it in the store description:

Most of my ancestors never sat in a Victorian parlour. They were more comfortable in the woods, on the farm or in the mines and worked hard building their new lives in America or migrating westward. Homestead was designed with these types of ancestors and family in mind. I have blended real farm photos taken with my Nikon dSLR to create some tan neutral rural backgrounds and the colored papers were created with the green of the 1930s-40s as an inspiration and a little blue to reflect the sunny sky. The patterns are not the fancy damask of the parlour but more suited to everyday clothing a rural family might own. There are period and themed elements as well as traditional heritage kit elements such as lace and flowers. Hope you enjoy!

This shows a look at some of the neutral tan papers that I created blending some of my own photographs taken with a Nikon dSLR camera. They are all farm/rural themed.



These papers are also available in the Homestead - Just The Papers pack.  My idea is that, being neutral, they could be combined with other kits to match in your heritage album, if you have one already going that you like, but needed some backgrounds that were more rural in nature. (Please note these papers are all included in the Homestead kit so there is no need to buy them extra - this is for people who don't want the kit but may want the papers)

Naturally there are some other colored papers as well.  Blue like the sunny sky above and soft greens.  The textures and designs in these are small and similar to the types one would see in clothing or textiles of the working class rather than the velvety damasks found in a Victorian parlour.

The green tone here was chosen to match the greens my Grandma had in her 30s/40s kitchen.

There are a few themed element pieces to give an idea, but not over the top.

 

Of course there are the regular types of elements that would expect to see in a heritage kit as well.





Journaling elements include 2 quick pages of 5 generation charts, 4 titles and papers and bookplates to tell your story.



Frames and Frame Clusters - a variety of plain and clustered.



Then I had so much fun, I kept going and creating things, thus the Homestead Pedigree Add On.

One of the main features of the add on, is the selection of pedigree charts.  This comes as full 12x12 jpg QP or 11.5" square with beveled edges that can sit on top of a background sheet allowing 1/4" all around to show.  A third option is the whole pedigree part with the book plates is available as a png that you could put on any of your papers.

Here is a view of the elements included in the Add On.  They have been reduced in size for the preview.



And these are the papers from the Add On kit.

Last, but not least - if you want both the kit and the add on, you can purchase them together as the Homestead Bundle.

This was a fun kit to create and I hope you'll enjoy it.  Please share any projects you might do with this.  I would really love to see them.