December of Memories 2021: Tips & Tricks for Mixing Kits!
Hi! Creative team member Danica. I am going to give some tips about one of my favorite things: how to mix scrapbook kits. Sometimes a kit may not have enough of or is missing a certain type of element, and an easy fix for this is to use something else you may have on hand already in your stash.
For my sample layout, I used the following kits from Traci Reed combining elements and papers from each:
Beginnings & Endings, Ex Libris Galaxias, #StayHome for the Holidays, Candy Coated Christmas, Catch ‘Em All, Comfy Cozy Are We, We The People, & The Naughty List
A key to mixing kits is to know what you have in your stash. You don’t necessarily need to be super organized for this to happen. Some scrappers use software like Bridge or the organizer in Adobe PSE and import their entire collection into to it. These programs allow you to tag items and conduct quick searches for what you are looking for. Another option which I use but not consistently is pinning kit previews of my stash to Pinterest. You can quickly peruse all in one place. You can even make your boards private. In a pinch I have also just gone to the shop I purchased the kits from to look at previews of my purchases.
The easiest method to mix kits are those products that have the same color palettes. Sometimes themed kits can be easily used together as well. The key is to make sure that your colors do not clash. I will discuss how you can recolor elements in a bit. A third option is to pick neutral color elements. Black and white work well if you do not want to do any edits.
The two main techniques I use when mixing kits are recoloring and covering things up. In the next section I will go into a bit of detail about each.
Covering things up is just what it sounds like. I do this a lot with flower centers. You can easily dress up or dress down a flower by switching out its center making it a better match for the layout you are working on. I used this technique several times in my sample layout. The large red flower in the top cluster had a bejeweled center. It probably would have looked fine, but I decided to add a bow and a different button to it. I did the same thing to the green ribbon flower directly next to it. It originally had a blue button as it’s center (which didn’t fit the color palette) which I covered up with a red button.
The other technique that I use often is recoloring. In my layout I used three different techniques to recolor various elements. I use Adobe PSE 10 to digitally scrap my layouts.
Color Variations
Let’s go back to that green ribbon flower. The original green in the flower was a much lighter color. It looked fine, but I thought it would look better if I tweaked the color just a bit. The way I did this is by using Color Variations in the Enhance Menu.
With the element selected follow this path: Enhance>Adjust Color>Color Variations. There you have several options to choose from. In my layout I just did a quick adjustment selecting Midtones and Darken.
Replace Color
In my layout, let’s go back to the green ribbon flower. The red button with green stitches used to have blue stitches. I wanted to keep the button red changing the stitch colors only.
With the button selected, I followed this path Enhance>Adjust Color>Replace Color. This method is a bit more complex to explain in detail how to use here, but there are plenty of online videos showing how to utilize it.
Blending Modes
The final recoloring technique I use is blending modes. I used this technique to recolor the red string in the top cluster. It was originally a pink color. I took a piece of red solid paper and clipped it to the string. I then added a second clipped paper to it. I then changed the blending modes of each layer, one to “color” and one to “color burn”. You can keep trying different blending modes until you find one you like. Once completed merge down all layers and save.
I hope you find these tips useful. Mixing kits opens up endless possibilities and helps you get the most out of your scrap stash.
For my sample layout I combined two of Brook Magee’s templates, Oh Holy Night for the majority of my layout and grabbed the title and banner from her Full of Joy template set. I used the following kits from Traci Reed combining elements and papers from each:
Beginnings & Endings, Ex Libris Galaxias, #StayHome for the Holidays, Candy Coated Christmas, Catch ‘Em All, Comfy Cozy Are We, We The People, & The Naughty List