Counterfeit Kit Challenge mini-kit and project reveal

I'm pretty excited because this is the first month that I'm on "mini-kit duty" over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge! We changed things up last month so that half the team make up a full kit along with the scheduled challenges on the blog and the other half make up some sort of a mini-kit and project based on the same inspiration kit.

You will no doubt know all about the original kit by now but just to remind you, here it is:

February Hip Kit Club main kit

You probably know that I make up pretty large kits most of the time so I knew this was going to take a mind shift for me. I mean look at all that scrummy stuff in the kit! I could easily have made up a HUGE regular kit.

So I kept in mind the main kit and then looked at the other items available - a lovely embellishment kit, a varied pocket page kit and a cardstock pack which picks up the main colours.

I know it's going to sound strange but I decided to just go with this cardstock pack and concentrate on getting the right colours for what I was going to pick out. But what sort of a kit should I make? A page kit, a card kit, a mini book or.... how about actually starting my Project Life album that I've been talking about for about 6 years! Every year I say that I'm going to do it and maybe this was the time to really stop talking about it and actually make a spread.

A pocket page kit it would be, then. Based on these colours:

 February Hip Kit Club cardstock kit

I'm thrilled to present Finally! My very first pocket page kit. And yes, I even made up a spread which I'll share later in this rather LONG post!

The kit started with the "Blah blah" Studio Calico card there in the middle as well as the hearts in a circle next to it. From there I built out with 6x4", 3x4" and a couple of square cards in the limited colours of the cardstock kit. I realised I'd need a bit of paper too so threw in those four sheets along the top.

And then I added in some of the Pinkfresh items I have from the Felicity and Noted collections - epoxy stickers, sequins and die cuts.

A handful of alphabets which I might need.

And some Simple Stories enamel dots.

It was really hard to limit my selections to just paper and flat embellishment type elements but I'm happy with the kit I've come up with. I knew that there would be too many of some items and too few of others but as this is the first time I've made this kind of kit, I allowed myself some flack. At this point, I had no idea of how I'd actually pull my PL spread together.

Now the following photos are really awful as it's totally last minute here, I've missed the light because these pages took me AGES - so the quality is terrible, sorry! I'm going to have to speed up as I thought the whole point of pocket pages was that they take minutes to put together!

Once I had my kit picked out, I looked through one month's photos and decided that I didn't want to limit myself to one spread per week or even per month but to leave it flexible. Then I didn't want to only have portrait or landscape photos and would like to include square shots too. Some important decisions. And I decided that I would go back to January - seemed manageable - and see if I could catch up with just this year as a start.

That meant that I was going to need to mix up the pocket pages - I've used Design A and D here - and looking at how many photos I wanted to include, it seemed that I needed two spreads for the month. That seems reasonable across a year - will they fit in one album?

Anyway, then I printed out my photos to see what I had and then worked out how to spread them across the pages. I made a title card and mixed in journalling and decorative cards for interest. To be honest, I made a lot of mistakes in this first month that I hope to learn from as I go on but I can't tell you how happy I am to have made a tiny step. And I even remembered to track down a couple of memorabilia items - go me!

What do I like about these pages?

• that they are done :-)
• that some of the photos are favourites but would have never made it to whole pages
• that I have some details down that are nice to remember
• that I used a few items of memorabilia
• that I used up some of my huge collection of pocket page cards

What do I dislike about these pages?

• that they took me forever
• that they don't look very cohesive
• that it was difficult to decide what journalling to add
• that I felt the need to decorate a lot which took a long time 
• that I got some of the quantities wrong and ended up tracking down a few extra cards to add to the kit

Things to ponder for next month. I already have the title page and a journalling card (remember my challenge entry for CKC last month?) so maybe I'll try and get that month done as soon as possible and use the rest of my February kit for that too.

Let me know if you have any top tips for me to solve some of my dilemmas!

Don't forget that there's more ways than ever to join in the fun over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge

• post on your blog or our Flickr group
• link up on the Monthly Link Up page 
• link up and join in the chat on the BRAND NEW Facebook Counterfeit Kit Challenge Community
• don't forget to like our Facebook Counterfeit Kit Challenge page too - we have 976 likes and would LOVE to reach 1,000!

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