Plum Dumpling Designs: Inspiration Wednesday: Kit Smorgasbord!

Happy Inspiration Wednesday, everyone! This is Nikki with a few ideas for one of my standby scrappy methods, the "kit smorgasbord." For as long as I've been a scrapbooker I have been a mix 'n' matcher... even as a paper scrapper I rarely scrapped a page using only a single, matching kit. Now that I'm a digi girl, I still love pulling bits and pieces from various kits to create pages and projects. This tendency (technique? habit?) has affected everything from the way I organize supplies to the way I build pages.

I know many scrappers tend to stick to a single kit to create a layout... and certainly storing supplies in kits may be a straightforward way to organize, but there are ways to "have your cake and eat it too"! Experiment with one or two kits at a time, and try the tagging options in your organizing software to see if it can work for you. I use iPhoto and have been thrilled to find that I can store my kits as kits in the main library, and also create a system of folders where at a glance I can see ALL my yellow ribbons, clock faces, torn edges, lined journaling spots, etc., etc., etc. (I've found this also helps me spend my digiscrapping dollars wisely, because I have a good idea of where my supply stash is a bit thin, and in which categories I have more than enough to choose from.)

I've also been thrilled to discover that the kits Mary creates for Plum Dumpling Designs' customers are infinitely mixable! I have especially loved combining Summer Storm with Black & Blue, Serendipity with I Scream, Family Fun with Indian Summer. Here are a few ideas for mixing and matching your favorite kits:

Use your software's brushes to give elements a more similar look. I used PSE's oil paint and watercolor brushes (using the eraser tool set at different opacities) on the sunshine from Indian Summer to make it resemble the "stamped" looking funky flowers from Family Fun. I also eraser-brushed over my font title and some word art to continue the "look."

(uses a Family Fun template)

Don't be afraid to recolor! Sometimes all it takes is a slight brightening or softening of colors to help an element or alpha blend with a kit that doesn't exactly match. There are many techniques for recoloring, and it may take experimenting with "fill layer" or hue/saturation, but it is worth the effort. I recolored the Spiromania elements to work with the Lob-Stah kit, along with the Basically Black alpha and elements from A Photo A Day:

(uses a Family Fun template)

Use the solid-colored papers from various kits to expand the color scheme of a layout. I used solids from Summer Storm and Black & Blue to create a monochromatic-ish layout that uses several different shades of blue, gray, and white. (This can work especially well on a layout with lots of photos, where you may not want tons of embellishment.) This also uses Basically Black and Tiny Vellum Dot alphas, and some stitches and date tag from A Photo A Day: