Kit Flow: Seeking Inspiration

Sunday, May 13, 2012

My May SC kit arrived! All shiny and new in it's lovely kraft pizza box. So I thought I'd share one of my processes for making layouts with these lovely things.


As you can imagine each kit has it's own theme & color scheme. 35mm was all blue, green, cream and brown. There's a bit of red and yellow in there, but just small pieces. There were some hexagons & one of the new flip books Heidi Swapp released this season. It's a nice kit with good bones, but not one of my absolute favorites. Which is what makes using it a fun challenge!


When my kits arrive I label them and put them in these jumbo hefty bags. It's the best way I've found to keep everything together and to be able to quickly see which kit is which.


It shouldn't be a secret by now that color is the driving force behind my pages. I'm an absolute color fiend. I start by searching for photos from my ever increasing catalogue with colors that will work with the kit. 

For this one I reached far back into my coffers and dug out some travel photos from 2008. There were a few places that I thought would work well with these products.

Like possibly Cambodia...


Or maybe Berlin...


I might even dig into some Ireland photos.


Notice the theme? All of the photos have a heavy blue/green influence. Funnily enough I'm even wearing the same t-shirt in a few.

Once I had some photos pulled, I went hunting around for inspiration. It's not something I usually do, but like I mentioned before this kit isn't one of my favorites, so I needed an extra push to form some ideas.

Celine's layouts were most inspiring for me. So I made sketches of a few and picked photos that I thought would work. Here are the layouts I drew some inspiration from: India 2012-My Top 5, First time in India, and Love Life & Life will Love you Back.


I ordered some enlarged prints via Persnickety Prints and am waiting for them to arrive. In the meantime, I made a few pages with regular and tiny prints that I'll be sharing throughout the week.

I also finished up all of my Sketchbook 4 layouts. Here I am mapping out where the photos will go. Those are my silly crude images of each the photos. Doing this helps me figure out the sizes I need to print them at and how I need to cut them down. My Epson PictureMate makes printing these tiny guys a breeze (link is to the newest model).


That's one way I approach using all of these kits I have piled around. Be sure to keep checking back to see how the pages turned out!

Also, this wasn't my usual blog post but I hope it's something you find useful. Please let me know if you're interested in reading more about this type of thing. I'm always interested in sharing "best practice". And if you buy kits, I'd also love to know how you approach using yours!

cheers & besos,

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