Friday, February 17, 2017

Kit Comparisons -- My Personal Decision Making Process

And here we are with a very popular kit club to review.  Bear in mind, my opinion in no way should be taken as an endorsement for or against any of the kit clubs I tried "on for size".  Each club has its own distinct look and feel and each contains many wonderful papers and products for us to play with. And each club will appeal to different people for different reasons. 


Citrus Twist

Papers
Each kit contained six patterned papers and two sheets of cardstock.  Sometimes one or two of the patterned papers were exclusive to Citrus Twist.  

Embellishments
Each kit I received contained a veritable plethora of embellishments in the form of at least two full packs of ephemera or die cuts, usually a sticker sheet, small acrylic pieces, full packs of sequins (and that's a lot of sequins!). One kit contained a partial pack of decorative paper clips, another contained some mini  tassels.  Also contained in each kit was usually an exclusive chipboard sheet, an exclusive cut apart sheet, and some sort of ribbon, fiber or washi tape.  In other words, there are loads of embellishment choices. 

Each kit I received also included a stamp set, which I have to say I  a.b.s.o.l.u.t.e.l.y.  loved. 

Alphabet/Titling Options  
The initial kit I received contained a puffy alphabet set, while the second kit contained a Thickers word/phrase set.  Each kit also contained other titling options either by way of a chipboard set or a sticker set that also had within it a small alphabet set or words and phrases.   No lack of titling options here.

General 
Each kit arrived in a timely fashion.

I found that the club offered many items that were very current in the marketplace.  The overall look and feel seems very feminine to me and while I do have a grown daughter and fabulously cute (not too biased, am I? LOL) granddaughter, I look for colors and prints that can be used for boys too!

We all like embellishments, but I have to say I was kind of overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of embellishments included.  If you are big on embellies, you'll adore this club!

Their facebook page is fairly active and the blog has some regular repetitive features to look forward to seeing a designers' take on each month.  And they truly have some wonderful, creative designers.

My favorite page created with a Citrus Twist kit:


This page was created much more in tune with my personal scrapbook style, patterned papers, a smattering of clustered embellishments--but not a lot of them.  This was one of the exclusive Citrus Twist papers and there was absolutely nothing out of my stash--well unless you want to count the white pain splatters, haha!).  Most of the other pages created were more heavily embellished (since I had gotten so many of them I felt I needed to learn to use 'em!!!).  I did find I was relying more on plain white paper backgrounds (or painted them) and made use of a lot of the included die cuts as layering materials rather than cut into the pattern papers.

I did make a couple of "kind of boy" pages---but it was stretching a bit. A few of the papers I thought would do well on a more masculine page did not seem to coordinate well with other papers.  Now perhaps if I had ordered an add-on kit of more papers, this would have been a mute point.  But this was not in my "rules" for comparing the various kits.  It was to be main kit only. 

Next on the hit parade will be Gossamer Blue...

best,
Cheryl

2 comments:

  1. thanks so much for such a thorough review! I subbed to the Citrus Twist PL kit a few years ago and loved it :). I will be following along as I want to sub to a scrap kit in the fall (on a spending freeze until then LOL, after splurging a bit on the new releases)

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