Hi everyone!
This is Karen and I am delighted to start a new regular column this month. I know I am not alone in hoarding lots and lots of scrapbook supplies. I also know I am not alone in being sad when I look at some of the "older" lines that I still love but don't get to use as much because there's so much new stuff that's waiting for me.
I also sometimes feel guilty buying new things when I know I still have plenty of the older lines. But one of the things I love love love about My Mind's Eye is that so many of their lines match perfectly. The colors always line up just right and I can mix and match lines that are three years old with ones from six months ago and ones that just released. Everything simply works together.
This means my older lines don't have to sit in the closet and gather dust. It also means I can buy a piece from a new line that I love and know that it will work with what I already have on hand. It means I can
just mix and match!
That's where the idea of this column was born. Each month, I'll make layouts that mix and match some of the older lines with the new ones so you can see examples of how they can easily work together. My goal is to encourage you to dip into your stash and pull out those old favorites and create your own ways to mix and match the lines!
With that, here's what I did this month. One of my all-time favorite older lines is Fine and Dandy so I pulled out that line, and The Sweetest Thing and my two recent
favorites: Collectible and My Girl & Boy Crazy lines. I love all the bright
and happy colors in these lines and I wanted to see if I could use them together to create a happy layout.
I wanted to challenge myself to do one more thing this time around which was to just put elements of my page down without much planning or thinking. I mean actually glue them down and then work with it as it
evolves instead of laying things down carefully, arranging and rearranging etc. I wanted to see if I could just have the layout evolve naturally.
Since I like my backgrounds white, I picked one of my other favorite lines: Follow Your Heart where
the Be Happy, Be Joyful paper has the perfect white back with subtle pink grid lines.
I picked recent photos of my husband and kids that I adore and just laid them on the page about three quarters down the page:
The next thing that caught my attention was the "Play" chipboard sticker from the My Girl line so I put that down and then added the stickers that spelled p-l-a-y from the same line. Going back to my Fine and Dandy line, I picked the chipboard sticker that said "you are one in a million" which matched the color of the background of the "l" in the p-l-a-y perfectly. I then added some of the little brown alphas from the Fine and Dandy line to spell out more of the title. I also interwove the sticker words from The Sweetest Thing and Collectible lines. I added the banners from the Fine and Dandy line to the right edge and my page looked something like this:
I then just had fun. I picked random elements from the lines I already had out and added them in different spots. I wanted to make one of my banners three-dimensional so I picked the banner chipboard from the My Girl line and added it on top of the Fine and Dandy ones I'd put on the right side:
I picked some of the papers and stickers from The Sweetest Thing and punched them with edge punches and put them around my photos and then added more layers using chipboards and stickers from Boy Crazy and My Girl:
and then I used all the dot enamels from whatever line I wanted to just embellish more and more and add pops of color:
I really tried to keep the whole process fluid and fun for myself. I loved how colorful the final page looked. So much so that I decided to do something I've never done before: I used four different threads when I stitched on my page. I made three different colored borders and stitched through my elements with random colors to make it even more colorful and fun.
And here's what my final page looks like:
I hope you can see all the fun I had building this one layout and even more significantly, can you see how all the five lines I used work seamlessly together even though some of them are brand new, others a
year old and even others more than a few years old. This is the magic of My Mind's Eye and how they create products that are timeless and can easily be integrated together.
If you have pages that mix and match old and new lines, I hope you leave a comment so I can see them, too! And if you haven't tried putting a layout together without overthinking it, I encourage you to take the
leap now. Just glue stuff down and work around it. You might be amazed at the wonderful results you get!
Until next month, thank you for letting me share my page and have fun mixing and matching!
