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!
In last month’s mash-up, we introduced the idea of a 2 kit mash-up and the reason behind this series, then used a shared theme (birthdays) as the connection between 2 kits of different styles from different designers.
This month, we are going to mash 2 KITS FROM THE SAME DESIGNER that have different themes.
- The main benefit of using different kits by the same designer is that each kit will often have the same or similar style even if the color palette and theme is vastly different, making mixing and matching easy.
Do you celebrate Christmas during the Summer like me? Using a Christmas kit and a Summer kit by the same designer might be just the kind of mash-up you need for a quick custom look! Whether your favourite designers main style is all clean and minimal, or all artsy, or a bit of both, give it a go!
And if, like much of the digital scrapbooking community, you have particular designers that are a fave that you often buy from, and you sort and organise your digi stash into folders under each designers name, going from single kit scrapping to mashing kits by the same designer is an easy transition. You don’t have to search your entire hard drive (or multiple hard drives….) for the perfect finishing touch element.
Even if you don’t have your kits sorted, just changing the display in your digi-stash Windows folder to sort by ‘Name’ will group kits by designer, making it easy to grab 2 kits to mash-up, as often their name or initials are part of their kit naming (may not necessarily include collabs). Tagging also isn’t really an issue either as a lot of designers name their elements and papers with their names or initials too so you can still keep your File Explorer search field pretty small if you have kits stashed in a few different places.
If we were to think about this in terms of a paper scrapping stash that has various products by different companies on different shelves, it means that instead of looking through my whole cupboard, I might only be looking through products on a single shelf. Much more manageable but also giving me a bigger range of products to use than just what is contained within a single kit.
- So because the Love Our Designers event is currently running and today we are loving Sahlin Studio, I’m going to mash 2 of her kits today. I’ve pulled out Summer Stories kit and Spring Stories, both on special with her entire store today as part of her LOD celebration!
Looking at the kits side by side you can see Sahlin Studio’s distinctive style – clean patterns and graphics, classics like stripes and polkas but also unique florals and great repeat prints, lots of wordart in various forms (I love the open capital letter words that are great ready-made seasonal titles and the monogram look wordart stickers ) and a great sprinkling of traditional elements like buttons, ribbons, flowers, brads and tags, some ephemera and pieces for journalling your stories on. (Her pocket scrapbooking card packs are pretty awesome as well). I also love vellum pieces and these kits have some cute ones, again using kits by the same designer just gives me more of what I love to choose from, to mix and match and mash-up but without much stash searching or credit lists that are a mile long, and that’s the main benefit of mash-ups to me.
Because of our rather soggy Summer, I wanted to scrap some real Summer memories and the diamond pattern paper in Summer Stories (that first one on the left of the kit preview up there) really caught my eye and helped me pick a template (I grabbed FiddleDeeDee Design’s Life in 3D 2 {Dressed Down} templates). We don’t have much of a distinction in seasons in my part of the world usually so the Spring Stories kit had pieces that I wouldn’t normally use on it’s own (but it’s too cute not to want to hoard!) but was an easy decision to pair with the Summer kit for this Same Designer Monday Mash-up.
Unlike last month, there was no great switching mixed media for traditional elements or vice versa because of the consistent style of the kits and this came together pretty quickly without any real swapping. Here’s my page:
Using the wordstrips and vellum pieces in the 2 kits for a mash-up was another easy decision and the different flowers in each kit really complemented each other. I didn’t re-color anything but that is of course an option we are lucky enough to have with a few clicks in digital scrapbooking! The colours in the background of my photos of the light blue water and neutral coloured sand leant themselves to both kits that share a similar pale blue tone and each have a kraft neutral tone as well. I used a combination of papers from both kits, mixing pattern scale and solids in like I would with any single kit page.
So what do you think about same designer mash-ups? Too easy, right?!
See you next month for another Monday Mash-up!
Dalis says
Justine, this is gorgeous!
Krista (norton94) says
This is a fantastic page – love how the two kits worked together!