Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone! Tammy here with this week’s tips and tricks of the trade. I’m wicked excited to be bringing you my very first scrappy post as DSI’s newest CT member.

Today, I’ll be sharing one of my most favorite ways to scrap. I’m a huge lover of mixing and matching pieces to give the page the exact feel I’m looking for. My motto is the more the merrier. If you’ve seen any of my pages, you’ll notice I tend to pull from a plethora of scrappy goodness. And while, I can be a one kit kind of girl if I need to be, I much prefer playing with a variety of yumminess. I find 9 out of 10 times, I tend to love my pages a bit more when I am not restricted to just one specific kit. My mojo loves when I let it out to play, giving it free reign to run wild through my stash. Half the fun of scrapping, for me at least, is searching for that perfect element/paper.

I’ve included a few screen shots of a page I created with DSI’s wicked cute kits and templates

As a template scrapper, I first start out by finding just the right template/templates to play with. For this page, I’ve combed two very different styles by DSI. While, I’m a huge fan of the minimalist style that the Elementary Templates carry, it’s just not a style I can pull off very well. I’m all about the layers and delicious clusters. So, in order, to expand my page to fit my heavy layering style, I also took some of my favorite parts from her Travel Notes Templates.

Now that I’ve combined and manipulated the two templates to fit the mood I’m in, I look through my photos to see what strikes my fancy.  Once I have my photos chosen, I then chose the kits I want to use. Usually I start with just one kit, but as my page progresses I find myself pulling pieces from others. I never actually start out with more than one kit in mind. Everything just kind of evolves as the page does.

Going off the fun vibe and colors of the photos I’ve chosen to scrap, my starting kit is DSI’s Express Yourself Bundle. Those paints and artsy papers are to die for and they immediately caught my attention as I was browsing her store. Once I got further into the process, I realized that I wanted to bring in different shades of blue and green, as well as some fun word art to accentuate the playfulness the girls were showing. Browsing the store again, I found DSI’s Favorites Bundle had exactly what I was looking for. Is that teal green and dark blue color combo not absolutely gorgeous?! These two kits blended seamlessly together.

And here is my finished page:

Thanks so much for joining me! I hope my page inspires you to try creating something a bit different and maybe outside of your comfort zone. I can’t wait to see your pages and how you mix kits.