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.
I hope you are enjoying the mash-up series, 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.
This month we are mashing 2 kits to help tell a unique story! As storytellers and documenters of everyday life, there will always be random and different photos on our camera rolls that have an unusual (and often funny) story that goes along with them. Mash-up scrapping makes enhancing those photos and telling that story easier by reducing the constraints of a single kit and means you can mix themes.
For my photos today, I wanted a funny, silly kit and also one with some kind of duck element. [Spoiler: I then forgot all about the duck element but there’s one in each photo so I mustn’t have missed it too much!]. So after a bit of a look in the store, these are the kits I’m mashing today.
Goofball and
Carnival and they are both by Kristin Aagard who does fun and themey so well and as we already know from a previous mash-up, this will help give a cohesive look to the page especially when mixing elements.
So here is the template with my photos dropped in and some papers and must-use elements from both kits placed. (Well except for the string of ducks with the targets on them that was in the Carnival kit). Putting the big elements, like that disguise in the top right corner, on the layout at this stage is always easier than trying to cram them in at the end and I felt that it was an element that highlights the humour in the moment so it should be kept large and not shrunk to fit at the last minute. A journal card in the spare photo spot is also something I decided on early on in scrapping this mash-up page.
Continuing on from adding in the big things at the start, I then went on to add an alpha title and it felt like that big disguise called for a big title to balance it out, plus with the text paper I used on the blue-ish tags, I didn’t want the title competing with those words so the scale and contrast were important factors in choosing which alpha and determining it’s relative size on the page.
And a big sentence title just did not fit nicely as a horizontal line like the guide on the template. But because templates are just jumping off points for me as opposed to exact layout maps, I was fine with splitting up the title and zig zagging it down the page. It felt like it worked with the banner element, as well as guiding the eye between the photos and down through the page and really just sums up my bird’s thoughts and expression.
And here is today’s mash-up finalised. I moved the journal box (again, the template offers a suggestion of where to journal but it’s my page and a relatively minor change to the overall page design), so the story would be easier to read and then finished it up on the joker card. Adding the red flower added some more humour but also brought some of that particular colour to the left half of the page as well as drawing attention to my bird just noticing her new friend in the left photo.
There is no designer in the world that could anticipate a story like this, or so many of our interesting must-scrap memories, so don’t spend forever searching for that crazy unique kit, mash your own and tell your story. See you next month!
