All for the Love of Tigers (SA & SATW)

Supplies: alphabet stickers, "Place" sticker, & grid paper from October Afternoon; all other paper from KaiserCraft; "Adventure" sticker from Echo Park; all metal embellishments from We Call Her Happydaks Etsy; rhinestones from Dee's Place; pen from Zig.

Welcome to my blog, whether you are a returning reader or a new one.  If you're a returning reader, you probably know that I love nature, and in particular I love animals.  You also probably know that my family visits zoos frequently to see the animals there.  Perhaps you've sometimes wondered how I, as an animal lover, can justify the fact that zoos "incarcerate" wild animals.  Well, I am actually a big fan of zoos (as least the two zoos in our Twin Cities area, which are very humane), and this layout explains one reason why I feel this way.  But before we get into all that, let's take care of the particulars.

I'm always looking for sketches that include multiple photos and space for lots of journaling, so I was very excited to use this sketch from the current Scrap Africa challenge.  I flipped it to suit my photos and filled the "white space" with my journaling.

With this layout I'm also playing along with this month's Scrap Around the World challenge.  I was inspired by their mood board (pictured above), but not in the obvious way, since I used very little pink.  Instead, I was drawn to the image of the big, beautiful rose that crowns the cupcake, so I used various papers with images of roses on my layout.  I also liked the keys on the typewriter, so part of my page title is spelled out with round alphabet stickers that resemble old fashioned typewriter keys.

A few detail shots...

~ a fussy-cut rose is peeking out from behind the photo~

~a pretty rose printed in the corner of the paper helps anchor the design~

~the tiger's tail helps break up the long title, leaving a space between "love" and "of" :)

And now, if you're still wondering about my feelings regarding zoos and tigers, here is my journaling.  It's pretty long, so feel free to skip it if you're not in the mood for reading an essay.  :)  The gist of it is that I'm proud of and thankful for the conservation work that our local zoos are doing, to save tigers and other endangered species.

My journaling:

I count myself lucky to have seen tigers in my lifetime.  According to the professor of the ecology class that I took in college, the world's tiger population is so severely depleted that the remaining gene pool might not be large enough and diverse enough to sustain many more generations. In other words, the tiger is so endangered that it might even go extinct during my lifetime.

However, the Como Park Zoo and the Minnesota Zoo are trying their best not to let this happen.  Both of these local zoos have Amur tigers, formerly called Siberian tigers.  (The Russian signage at the Minnesota Zoo even makes visitors feel like they're in Siberia!)  Usually the best place for wild animals is in the wild, but in this case a well-designed zoo environment is actually quite good.  The Twin Cities zoos' tigers participate in breeding programs devised to try to increase and diversify the tiger population.

I fervently hope that captive breeding programs (as well as conservation efforts in the natural habitats of tigers) can save this gorgeous beast.  It would be a shame if we humans, with all our knowledge and technology, could not save the largest of all the big cats from extinction.

~Are we in Russia or the USA? :)

~some bilingual signage~

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.  :)  Thanks for stopping by my blog today to see my tiger layout.  Take care!