Assembling Your Own Kits

Very, very, very little secret that I love scrapbook kits. Kits offer a group of supplies and embellishments in one place that eliminates the analysis paralysis I can get when faced with the hundreds of choices I have in my studio for papers and other supplies.

I buy kits individually and subscribe to them for months at a time upon occasion.

I even now design for a very special kit club that encourages me to get ME in my pages. Check out the side bar for that!)

And, of course, I make my own. I find that grabbing ONE bag of supplies with my pictures really helps me to get pages done and get my stories on paper.

Where does one start to put together their own kit?

There are  probably 1000 ways to assemble a kit that works for you.

I happen to follow the same process over and over…and honestly, it would work for making any craft kit with just a few tweaks.

The most important thing in creating your own kits is to keep your personal style in mind.

Let me do a little disclaimer…I’ve made “experimental” kits for certain events or projects. I do this from time to time to encourage me to play with my newest things or to try new techniques. BUT for my normal scrapbooking and/or crop kits, I stick to my normal style:

I scrap single page layouts that are generally photo heavy.

I love using patterned paper and largely neutral cardstock.

I’m a flat embellishment girl

I love washi, ribbon and letters.

Keeping in mind my style, this is my general process:

Step One: Gather Patterned paper and cardstocks. 

I try to focus on a three color scheme, with the same intensity and then use neutrals to flesh out the kit. Sometimes I begin this process with a single paper that has inspired me and sometimes its a color scheme. In this case, it started with that colorful alpha numeric paper in the bottom right corner.

The colors that jump out at me are the blue, red and yellow, plus neutrals of black, kraft and off-white. This is actually an older set of pictures, so you will notice a lot of the older papers in the mix.

You will notice I have two red, two blue, two yellow, two black…essentially more than one option of a color to work with when I get creating with the kit.

Step Two: Flat embellishments and stickers. 

This could include journal cards, stickers, borders, die cuts…pretty much anything that is flat. I happen to LOVE letter stickers and thickers, so my kits have a lot of those.

Again, there is a mix of my key colors – blue, yellow and red – plus neutrals as well as a variety of things to work with.

Step Three: Dimensional embellishments. 

I have a TON of dimensional embellishments, but I am not a fan of bulky pages. SO, these are usually used sparingly. In some kits, I add ton of them, and in some I do not. In this case, I pulled some tags, older chip board shapes, a variety of buttons and some washi tape.

The final step is to put it all together into a container of some sort…I happen to use 2 gallon zip lock bags for storage because they don’t add any EXTRA bulk and they are inexpensive to replace when they wear out.

If you are interested in creating your own kits and/or getting some inspiration, here are some additional (and in some cases very in-depth) resources:

We All Live in a Yellow Scrapmachine - Kit-Love (or how Istopped looking for things and started scrapbooking more)

Paper Crafter’s Corner – Build Your Own Scrapbook Page Ktis

Pretty Paper, True Stories (Shimelle) – How Do You Make AScrapbooking Page Kit

Get It Scrapped (Debbie Hodge) - Make your own scrapbookpage kits and speed up your scrapbooking

Scrapbook.com - Creating Your Own Scrap Kits

And if you want to create a kit a month and then scrapbook with it immediately (including inspiration for making your own papers, embellishments and other fun challenges!)– check out the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog.

Happy Kitting!

Peace, ya’ll!