New month. New kits! I love the beginning of a month because it means I get to pull out scrappy products – either brand new, or more often hidden gems from my stash – and get to work putting them together in pretty kits to play with for the month. By the beginning of the month I’ve played with my previous kits enough that I am tired of them and ready for something new. So the energy from putting together a new kit is a nice refresh at the start of the month.
I don’t build a kit from nowhere. I usually take inspiration from something to get me going. Right now I am playing along with two kit projects to draw my inspiration. So let’s take a look at each.
Shimelle Laine’s Best of Both Worlds kit
While she provides a kit that you can buy outright, she also has the flexibility to do it your way. Here is how it works. Visit her shopping list at Scrapbook.com. Add the items on her shopping list to your shopping cart. Leave off any items you already have or don’t like. Add in any extras that you need for your craft supply (it is a full service paper crafty website after all). Boom. Done. Scrapbooking kit created by a designer to coordinate nicely, no commitments to subscription programs and flexibility to make it your own.
But I rarely follow the basics. I just have to be a rebel and go my own way. That usually means looking at her kit, finding what inspires me – perhaps icons, or a color pallet or a certain mood – and then I build my own kit. Often I do this from supplies I already own since I have plenty. But this month I was inspired by a color pallet that isn’t in my stash so I shopped very specifically for those supplies (and Shimelle still gets credit as an affiliate!). See where my brain took me this month.
I started with navy and coral colors, added in yellow and then build out the kit with embellishments featuring circles, flowers and gold. See my whole process in the video below.
Counterfeit Kit Challenge
This group offers a blog and facebook group to bring you an actually scrapbook kit as inspiration that you can then mimic, or as the title suggests, counterfeit. This means that you can completely use supplies you already own. And the group offer community, design team inspiration and challenges through the month to get you scrapping.
I did have a face-palm moment when I realized I didn’t include an alphabet in this kit. But since i have a good stash of those I will just go to my supply when I need something. That will give me a little more flexibility on each layout. In fact I created this page with my kit right away and grabbed the alpha out of last month’s kit. It was running low on letters so I couldn’t make the full title I wanted, but getting more of the supply used up makes me feel less guilty when I have to throw away unused letters and number.
If you’d like to see my whole build process you can check out this video.
Do you like to build kits? What is it about the process you enjoy? Or do you struggle? What makes it hard for you? Leave me comments and we can talk about kit building.
craftysoup.com 