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! ______________________________________________________________________________________________
Hi there and welcome to a fun new way to start Mondays in the middle of the month – The Monday Mash-up!
- Some background on ‘why’ this series: After several years in the scrapbooking community, it appears that there are a few different groups of scrappers. On one end of my theoretical sliding scale are those that love to mix and match, and the more, the merrier! (You know if you’ve been in this group because you’ve probably spent longer looking through your stash and crediting everything you used to make your layout than actually scrapping it). And on the other end of that scale are the scrappers that prefer to stick with single kit scrapping. There are benefits to both extremes depending on who you talk to. There are devotees to each way of scrapping and some scrappers that change their method from page to page (and I’m that kind of scrapper), but regardless of where you usually sit on that scale, this series aims to give you a bit of the best bits of both worlds.
This month we are going to mash 2 kits from 2 different designers that have the SAME THEME.
The shared theme means that even if they are different colours or design styles, the kits have something in common that makes mixing and mashing them together and creating a new layout easier than two completely different kits.
The store has several themes (as well as seasons and events) already sorted to make finding things easy if you are looking for something particular to scrap a photo, event or story with. So for today’s page, I’m going to mash-up 2 BIRTHDAY kits.
Because the Love Our Designers event is on, I’m using a birthday kit by Mommyish, called Go Me, It’s My Birthday, which is on special with her entire store today Feb 14 as part of her Love Our Designers day, and I’m going to mash that with another birthday themed kit called Hip Hip Hooray by Rachel Jefferies.
Looking at them side by side, ‘Go Me’ has a more traditional paper scrapbooking style.
The element pack has more traditional things like buttons and ribbon, lots of fun wordart stickers and the paper pack is full of cute, colourful themed papers and more generic patterns that make me think of wrapping paper, while Rachel’s kit has her recognisable mixed media style with lots of paint, doodling and marks, stamped wordart and her papers are gesso and stitched textured whites with pieces of doilies and holepunch reinforcers.
- The shared theme gives me iconic birthday elements, like balloons, in sticker, enamel pin and paper form from the Mommyish kit, as well as painted balloons in Rachel’s kit, which also has painted candles in contrast to the ‘real’ candle elements in Mommyish’s kit, which has candle icons used in other ways in her elements pack and again in the paper patterns. This makes mixing and matching styles easier in my opinion, coming from a kit only scrapping point of view. Because I would call traditional paper scrapping my ‘safe’ or ‘comfortable’ style and ‘mixed media’ my experimental zone when I’m feeling brave or challenged, I find it easier to start with traditional patterned papers and elements. I can then swap a ‘traditional’ balloon for a mixed media one as an easy way to add a bit of difference to what might feel like (sigh) another birthday page. (Haven’t we all scrapped eleventy billion birthday pages with more to come?!)
- Mashing in scrapping not only extends your options for scrapping but means you can dabble in new (or ‘new to you’) styles in basically a low risk way. It makes it feel a bit more refreshing, especially if you are feeling on of the effects of a limited budget.
- These kits also have a few colours in common too, with the solid papers along the bottom of the Go Me preview making that medium blue (third from the left) stand out as a pretty close match to the one Rachel used. The alpha in Mommyish’s kit is a gender-neutral orangey-yellow polka dot in watercolour which is fairly close to a few of the painted pieces of Rachel’s kit too. Because I can already see these things, my brain starts seeing possibilities and the dragging in and swapping starts in my digiscrapping program. Toggling layers on and off and ‘undo’ is your friend if you are just starting out as a mash-up scrapper!
Here is a bit of the evolution of my Birthday themed page, also using Scrapping with Liz | Focal Point Templates 7, and the final version of my first Monday mash-up!
- Starting with my safe traditional patterned papers and photos and some key wordart that spoke to me. The tags in Rachel’s kit felt like a good match for the big tag in Scrapping with Liz’s template. That big zig zag doodle of Rachel’s in the middle of the page connects the two photo blocks of the template nicely but it was lost on the patterned background. The blending spot on the SWL template, with textured white paper from Rachel’s kit clipped to it, gives it some room to shine and mentally that brought me to include the zig zag stitching and I liked that it pulled in a darker colour to offset some of the vibrant colours.
2. Tried to balance the colours already used and add more mixed media and dimensional elements. Lots of indecision and ‘undo’-ing here but enjoying a different style of birthday page for me! This is the point that I sometimes forget where the template had element markers and make it my own.
3 & done! Swapped out the green twirly ribbon & triangle doodles and swtiched that big blue painted balloon for a sticker balloon. Felt like the blue of the squiggle with the music note paint streak in the top corner and the blue painted bow on the painted gift balanced the big blue tag. Not a cake page so the enamel pin went but still achieved a full, happy and energetic party vibe like I was going for.
JenEm says
What a wonderful post, Justine! Lots of great ideas, and I love how your page turned out! :)
Rebekah says
I’m a mix-and-match scrapper and you’re right – sometimes the search (and the crediting) takes FAR longer than the actual scrapping. Not a big deal most of the time, but it can definitely make things like MOC even more challenging! I love the idea of picking 2 or 3 kits and using them to make my own collab.