project life :: 17-24 Nov

I’m not showing a full spread this week – it’s nothing too exciting, mainly photos, with only the title card and this letterpressed cardstock card, and quite a few of the photos would need obscuring for various reasons, and so I have just a snippet today, to show off my pretty letterpress journalling card, and these cool instagram photo templates that I downloaded from here.

I decided to use the cardstock for journalling, as my kit has very few options for horizontal journalling cards – which brings me to today’s info dump, kits and paper packs.

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ON CORE KITS AND ADD-ON PAPER PACKS

When I first ordered my Honey edition core kit ready for 2014, I bought all the bits. Core kit. Dividers. 4×6 cardstock. 2 lots of 3×4 cardstock. The 12×12 paper pack. Partly because my craftyOCD insists I have the complete matching set, partly to give myself lots of options and to try and give me a back-up plan against running out of stuff to complete to album (which, again, the COCD insists has to be the same edition alllll the way through). Then I ordered the Jade edition for the remainder of 2013, and a mix of craft budget curtailment and the time remaining in the year, combined with a lack of time to actually think about each layout, led to *gasp* restrained purchasing. I only got the core kit and cardstock pack.

A week or two in, I was starting to regret all the cardstock packs – I wasn’t using them at the time, and when I did want them, they didn’t include whatever colour I was looking for. Now, over a month in to doing the project in real time, I’m a bit more ambivalent. I’ve been glad for it at times, I’ve used some with my die cutter to create labels, and the way I really love using them, like this week, is as a journalling card with a letterpressed accent.This was especially important this week, as there is a distinct lack of horizontal journalling options in 3×4″ in this kit – not sure how the Honey kit is for these. It’s very obviously a kit based around the Design A pages. Which brings me to my next purchase…the paper packs.

I didn’t bother with the Jade paper pack, as I figured for three months I would have plenty of stuff with the kit. As it turns out, I’m using Design F pages every three weeks or so, and I am finding the options for text graphics or journalling cards in 3×5″ horizontal pretty limited. The other place I’m finding the paper packs would have been useful, is I quite often have  two or three of the 4×6″ slots open, and I don’t always want/need journalling cards in those spots (plus a lot of my 4×6″ journalling cards actually seem to be folded ones so won’t work in that slot anyway). Sometimes I just want something pretty in there. And while I have a few patterned cards left from where I didn’t follow the kit instructions for the title page, the vast majority of my 4×6 cards are title cards.
I do have some ideas in mind to circumvent these issues for my current album, but I am glad I went ahead and got the paper pack for next year. If I’s feeling this way a couple of months in, how will I feel after almost a year in the one kit?

What does everyone else do? Do you add stuff to the core kit or keep it in the same line? I’d love to hear your thoughts!