Friday, March 20, 2009

Why I love Kits

Happy First Day of Spring! There is a cyber crop at TSR this weekend and it's already hopping.

As you know, I'm the scrap-room's biggest fan (although I'm sure a lot of other members would wrestle me for that title) and I blog about them often. It's my favorite kit and I do love my kits. For March, one of the page kits was Jackson Lodge by Collage Press. Each kit works out to be a bit over five dollars and I purchase the patterned paper add-on which brings it to about $7.00. Adding only extra cardstock from my stash and a few pieces of ribbon and twine, I made all this.




This is for the sketch this week at Card Positioning Systems:



And you've already seen this:



This is what was left over:



What I love about killing a kit is how a lot of design opportunities are presented that I wouldn't have attempted on my own. For example, Disneyland and Decision were what I think of as intentional designs. I started out with a stack of new paper and had my way with it. Next came the CPS card. Since that required specific shaped paper, I needed to make it while I still could. Then came La Jolla. It's just my scraps, inked, lined up and stitched. Then I added the fussy-cut flowers and turned it around until I liked it. I had a lot of rectangular squares left from the first four pages and I decided to make a color-blocked background instead of several cards. I had a circle and some partial circles remaining from Disneyland so I added them too for interest. I think it turned out to be a pretty neat page and all I had to add was ribbon and twine to unify it.

I've heard people worry that using too much of the paper will make everything the same - hardly. These pages will go in albums as far flung as 1996 and as recent as last week. If someone has the stamina to look through all forty of my albums I doubt they'll notice that I used the same flowers.

Did you notice I did some single photo layouts? *gasp* I never do that, but there was only one pic of me and Chris when I was seven months pregnant, Maki Men will probably go up on the wall and Decision lended itself to a single photo as well.

Have a great weekend.

10 comments:

Char said...

I love their kits too. I had to skip on March and now I am really hating it b/c these LO's are beautiful!!! Great job.

Pamela said...

Awesome work with the kit!

Ann said...

These are awesome LOs! I love the colors, and the branches are way cool!

Linda Beeson said...

wow, have you been busy! LOVE the layouts, everyone of them and great use of that CPS sketch.

Unknown said...

You got alot of pages out of that. They look great!

Charity Hassel said...

cool card! thanks for using the cps sketch!

Terri Trotter Earley said...

Wow! Lots of good cards and pages. Super job on the sketch.

It's a good life!
Terri E.

Stephanie said...

Beautiful layouts Nicole! You sure got a lot made just with the one kit! You have such a cool style; I love looking at your work!

Laura said...

grrr... you naughty thing you! You shouldn't post about places like scrap-room as I just had to place an order there. eeeek! I hope that the shipping to australia won't kill me! I so loved the look of March FOTM. I couldn't resist it and I ended up adding two of the older kits, too *LOL.

Kathi said...

Wow. All that from one kit? Yikes! I really love those branches and the papers. Darn it. Now I need to go look at those kits!

Great layouts and I love the Bombshell card too.

Wow.