Tips for stretching your stash?

Angela uses affinity software, but I think the idea would be the same in PSE or CC. The idea is to make a brush from the element. Duplicate the element to a new file so you don't ruin it. Flood fill the element with black (ctrl, shift, alt, backspace) and choose edit > define brush. Name it and now you have a brush to use. HTH

 

You mean you don't take after your mom and use everything in sight on your pages? LOL!

I'm a big fan of kits with lots of papers, both solid and patterns. I use a lot of Liz's templates and hers just scream to use lots of papers.

 

The method @keepscrapping shows is one way I've used elements as brushes. I don't know if you can do this one in Photoshop, but in Affinity we can also use image brushes, these are great for turning elements into scatters, or a row of straight stitching into a drawing brush to make curves etc. If using the elements as scatter brushes I can have multiple elements or just one in the brush, and can set it to rotate, resize and change the spacing etc. I could do some Affinity tutorials later in the week.

in the screenshot above the flowers are from Lynn Grieveson's Glitz Girl, and those sunny faces are stickers from Becca Bonneville's Universe is Calling.

 

We'd have to check your "scrapping DNA" if you didn't use everything in sight! You two are far more alike in your scrapping styles than my mum and I ever were, though now that I have discovered my love for digi paint and stitching I'm getting closer

 

Me too! I love using lots of papers, and I love how Liz's templates sort of give me permission to do that.

For me, the best way to stretch my stash is to "shop my stash" and actually use some of the stuff that I've already bought but have yet to use. A few weeks ago, I found a great kit (Kristin Aagard's "Artsy") that I had purchased a couple of years ago for some hypothetical LO that never materialized, and it was like finding a new kit ("Wow, this is great! Why haven't I used this yet?!"), and I had great fun making a new LO.

 

My best way of stretching my stash is using the search function in Windows for whatever type of page I'm making... so like if I'm making a camping page, I search for camping and see what pops up. More often than not, I find something I completely forgot about in my stash and then it's brand new again. And then I also get a couple options and that helps me mix and match stuff so it's also like a new collab kit!

 

Love the ideas above.

I also use the search function on my computer to look for certain elements. Another thing that I always do when I want to stretch a kit is, I'd go shopping in my stash and look for kits that have similar colours, create shortcuts to their folders, and place the shortcuts in the same folder as the kit that I want to stretch. This way, I have similar-coloured elements or papers that I can browse through instead of being limited to just one kit. Kind of like my own BYOC, hehe.

 

Lived in Vegas for 4 years. There was 1 day of tiny snow. That was hard in January with all the snow kits!

 

My mom and I have totally different styles too. We always have from when we did paper to now doing digi. What's funny is with paper I was the plainer one, with digi she is.

 

There's a lot of style differences here too with me and the Toucanettes.