The Monday Mash-up - Mashing Pocket-style

Are you primarily a one kit only scrapper, on a budget or looking for ways to extend your stash?

Mashing 2 (or 3!) kits together (and making your own customised collab!) gives you so many opportunities but means you won’t have to spend all your time tagging or searching your stash. If mixing and matching is not your normal style and feels daunting, this series will look at several ways to make mixing different design styles easier than you think!

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Hi there and welcome to a fun new way to start Mondays in the middle of the month – The Monday Mash-up!

definition: Mash-up

noun- informal.

* a combination or mixing of dissimilar elements, especially content from different sources.

Some background:

Welcome back for another Mash! In case you are new to the Monday Mash-up, so far we have mashed kits of different styles from different designers that have a theme in common, we mashed 2 kits with different themes by the same designer and very different kits with the colour blue in common, and also different kits that share a black and white base colour, and just last month we mashing vastly different themed kits to tell a unique story.

This month we are mashing pocket-style! As part of our current Summer School 2022 event, the pocket scrapping, past Memory Pockets Monthly and journal cards categories are all on sale this week and there will be a tutorial coming up specifically on journal cards. Pocket scrapbooking took off several years ago with the Project Life method of documenting our day to day. In the paper scrapping world, it initially involved putting printed photos and journal, date and filler cards in 3×4 and 4×6 inch plastic sleeve pockets to make memory-keeping easy and encourage scrappers and non-scrappers alike to get their photos off their phones and into albums to preserve their stories in a more tangible but relatively easy way. Over the years the sizes and orientations and possibilities with pockets have expanded and digital pocket pages have followed this trend. Whether you like clean or artsy style scrapping (or a combination of them!), you can find pocket templates and pre-made pocket cards to suit you or you can make your own with ‘normal’ scrapbook supplies like paper and elements. The clean rectangle blocking and universal sizes mean that you can easily mix journal cards from different themes and different designers and still have a cohesive looking page. It also means that if you are making a special album or photobook, maybe about a new baby or specific vacation, sticking to pocket pages regardless of the different card packs used will make the whole book more uniform too. Sahlin Studio and Britt-ish Designs’ massive Project Mouse line is made with this in mind and I got started in pocket scrapping back with the first Project Mouse card packs, got hooked and have been using pocket pages to scrap about travel since then. The Memory Pockets Monthly (MPM) range is now also massive and caters to a wider range of themes and makes mixing and mashing almost too easy!

So today I needed a dose of sunshine so I’m scrapping some beach photos.

I have Memory Pockets Monthly :Go pack which comes with papers, elements and an alpha as well as cards in 3×4, 4×4 and 4×6 size, as well as Elif Sahin Design – Livin’ La Vida journal cards and coordinating elements pack to work with. And because I love templates (sorry, not sorry!), I’m also using a Pocket Stories no.4 template from Designs by Soco.

Let’s Mash:

So here is the Designs by Soco template with my photos dropped in. I thought about using another photo in the large 6×4 spot in the bottom right corner but for now, stuck with just 3 photos but that is some of the beauty of pocket scrapping – there is no need for a huge redesign of a page if at the last minute you decide you want to add another photo. That would be almost impossible with some freestyle or traditional layouts or templates but not with pockets!

Next I have added in cards and wordart and this all starts to come together really quickly for me if I can stick to the clean look. I have just 4 card pockets to fill and have added just a sprinkle more wordart and elements, using the template as a guide but also just going with the flow. The fact that the pocket cards I used here come from different packs is not at all obvious, None of the cards I used here needed recolouring or altering to work together on this page. The Family Travel and Wander cards side-by-side are from different pocket card packs and different designers and I don’t think anyone would guess.

And here is today’s pocket page mash-up finalised. I used a coloured background paper to give the cards and frames more contrast and after sufficient journalling fit on the Wander card, I switched the Wanderlust journal card on the left in the previous screenshot for the cloud patterned filler card from the MPM:Go pack instead. A few more little details like the stitched waves and word tags and it was done and documented!