Mix and Match: Think Outside the Box

Hi everyone.  Polly Tiki here.  Welcome to another edition of Mix and Match.  Today I’m going to walk you through my thinking process on a recent layout of my son playing soccer.

I know a lot of you look at what pictures you need to scrap and then look for kits that match the theme of that picture.  For instance, if you have a soccer picture you will search for Soccer kits or Sports related kits.  If you have pool party pictures, you’ll search for Pool Party kits.  This is all fine and dandy but if your favorite store is the Lilypad, this type of searching will cause you to miss out on a lot of great products we have in the store.  Sometimes to get a really unique layout, you have to think outside the box a bit.

Here is the picture I wanted to scrap.

My son is the one in black fighting for the ball.

The first thing I did was go to the Lilypad store and type in “Soccer” to the search box.

Here are the hits that I got:

Gina’s Soccer Buddy

Kate’s School Sports

Jacque’s Loccer Room

and Karah’s Sports Zone Word Strips

Now I could have chosen Gina’s great kit and added a couple doodles from Jacque and Kate and been done but I’ve already done some traditional soccer type layouts and wanted to do something a little different for this one.  I did end up using the soccer ball and cleat from Kate’s doodles to tie in the soccer theme of my layout.

My son is extremely aggressive out there on the soccer field.  He is the only one so far on his team to score any goals.  His teammates look up to him to lead the plays and score the goals.  Following this line of thought, I thought maybe a hero type search might bring up some fun elements to use for my soccer layout.  I was specifically looking for a cartoon type feel.  I went ahead and typed “Hero” into the store’s search engine. I got a lot of hits with this search.  The kit that caught my eye was this one by Juliana Kneipp and Kaye Winiecki called My Hero.

I decided to use this kit as the base for my soccer layout.  It was exactly the idea I had in my mind’s eye.

I then started thinking about what other elements would be fun to add to my layout.  I thought “Star” and “Dream” would be good search terms because my son has a current dream of becoming a professional soccer player.  I tried popping each of those words into the search engine.  I immediately found a couple more element packs I thought would look great with my layout.

I also thought this element pack would be fun to use.

Now that I had my elements pretty much looked after, I wanted a really bold black paper pack.  I clicked on Paper Packs from the Categories in the store and looked for a bold black paper pack.  I got lucky and the first one there was this gorgeous pack by Allison Pennington.

I also wanted a grungy white paper to use under my layout to give a comic book feel to the layout.  I ended up using an older one in my stash by Gina Miller.

I also used this great alpha by Kate in addition to the My Hero kit alpha and a retired alpha by Karah Fredrick.

With these elements in mind, I set off to make my layout and this is what I came up with.

I really like how it turned out.  It’s much more fun than a standard soccer page.

By not restricting yourself to kits that match the theme of your photo, you will really open yourself up to dozens of products that would work beautifully to highlight your photo.  You could choose a different theme like I did here or you could choose kits and elements based on the colors in your photo.  By thinking outside the box, not only will your layouts be unique but you will find you can recycle products that you already have in your stash.  It just takes a little bit of creativity and a slightly different spin on the ordinary.  I hope you found this helpful.  Happy scrapping everyone!