How to Love Your Kit Club --- Even if You Aren't Loving All of It!!!!

The Challenge:  When you subscribe to a kit club, you are inevitably going to receive a kit or at least parts of a kit that you don't like.  Such was the case with last month's Scrapbook Circle kit.  While I loved portions of it, there was this paper...a very popular paper among other scrappers, just not me, I guess.  It had multi-colored (kind of a quilt pattern) leaves in repeat pattern. 

I'm not much of a repeat pattern fan, unless I can cut things out and use them as accents (which I did here), or it's a subtle pattern that can be used as a background paper.  But even cutting them out, the colors were just a bit much for me. 

What to do, what to do?  I tried scattering them about; I tried piling them up; I tried a thin coating of gesso.  But then there was this one 3x5 project life type card with pretty gold outlined leaves, actually several cards were included, but only one with these gorgeous golden leaves.  So I painted them lightly with watered down Heidi Swapp mists and then thought well why not try this over the patterned leaves.  Voila!  I even added some straight gold  to the leaves.  Loved that the pattern showed through, but not so strongly. 

And I was off then, in the hunt for my gold metallic thread to sew the leaves down into place. 

Then it was just a matter of layering up that photo and comping up with a title.   Now remember, this was the kit that came without an alpha set...I have other Thickers and stickers, but am still trying to keep working within the kit.  Since I was using a white cardstock base, I used the "capture" from the included Thickers pack (in keeping with my aversion to white halo borders -- this looked ok to me on a white background). 

The photo corners at opposite sides of the page are cut from the backside of the leaf patterned paper.  Added some splatters from the Heidi Swapp gold and peach, then cut a couple of hearts from the heart cross-stitch pattern paper and tucked the remainder under the photo as one of its layering pieces.

That was it--almost all my time was spent trying to figure out how to use those leaves!  Once that was accomplished the page was a snap to finish.  (It did take a bit of time to hand sew the leaves in place, but that's OK.  I stitched while watching TV!) 

My thing here is, try something new with a paper you are not in love with.  What can it hurt?  It might even turn out pretty, well, shiny and golden and pretty!

best,
Cheryl