Here at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog, we are sure to take some time every month to go deeper into our kit-building process to [hopefully] inspire you to dig deep into your own stash of scrappy supplies and build a kit you love!
As a reminder, our inspiration kit this month is lil' man by Bella Gypsy Designs.
First things first, do not let the name and all those fun little boy phrases deter you from playing along if you don't have little boys in your world to scrapbook! If you break the kit down into colors/patterns/motifs, you can make this kit just about anything you wish. The black & white title pieces can serve as inspiration to find your own quotes and words to add to the kit, they do not have to be boy, or even child, themed!
Now, where do we start? For me, I almost always look at color. I actually use an online color palette picker, Coolors, to help me get started! This site allows you to either let their system randomly choose colors for you OR you can use the picker option and move around the image yourself. All you have to do is upload the photo of the inspiration kit and the site will help you create a beautiful color palette. You can also choose how many colors in your palette, I typically choose 4 or 5 depending on how colorful the inspiration kit is.
Here's my chosen color palette for April:
My next step is deciding a theme/season to include. This kit just screams SPRING to me, so that's where I started. I also have two young boys as the primary subjects of my scrapbooking these days, so keeping the little boy theme also works for me. This kit also has a lot of fun motifs - flowers, gears, hearts jump out at me.
Here's a few other ideas I had for themed kits before I get into sharing mine!
- Perhaps you or someone in your life is mechanically inclined and loves to work on cars/engines - focus on finding geometric pattern papers and adding in plenty of gears for a grungy garage-feel kit.
- Masculine scrapbooking not your style? Pull out the lighter colors, pink, yellow & baby blue and create a beautiful pastel kit to scrapbook spring or Easter. Add LOTS of flowers!
- There's a lot of greens in this kit - outdoorsy themes, such as gardening or even hiking, would make great choices as well!
- Finally, abandon "theme" altogether! There are so many fun geometric patterns in this kit, it would work wonderfully for scrapbooking those everyday photos, regardless of season!
Now, let's take a closer look at my April kit - "Spring Things"
Since I knew I wanted to focus on spring themes this month, I started by pulling out some spring-themed pattern papers that coordinated with my color palette:
Next, I went searching for some basic prints & background paper options to round-out my paper selection:
Now that I have my papers selected, it's time for the fun stuff! I was surprised to find a lot more spring-themed goodies in my stash than I was expecting, so this kit quickly grew and grew. Here's my spring-themed embellishments. I've included a few cut-apart card sheets, lots of floral ephemera & fun flair and other small embellishments! I love layering clusters on my layouts, so having a variety of embellishment styles is a must for me. I'm also playing along with a 6x6 paper pad class this spring, so I included a few of those here as well.
I also wanted to include some boy-specific embellishments and rounded it out with some miscellaneous goodies and a few stencils/dies/stamps I'd like to play with as well! Of course, I had to include gears like our inspiration kit!
and finally, one of my favorite things to do when building a kit is build up my own little box of goodies focusing solely on color! I keep a lot of items sorted by color, so this is always a fun way to use up some loose embellishments. I will go to this box of goodies first when creating layouts too.
Let's see what we have lined up for the rest of this month:
- 4th April - Forgeries on the Fourth
- 6th April - Mini Kit and Project Reveal
- 12th April - Challenge #1
- 18th April - Challenge #2
- 22nd April - Challenge #3 Sketch Challenge
- 24th April - Follower Showcase
- 26th April - April Sneak Peek (on Instagram and the Facebook Community)
- 30th April - Challenge #4 Baby, Use Those Scraps Challenge
We love to see what you are working on! Drop in your projects to our Facebook Community Group and of course tag us on Instagram at #counterfeitkitchallenge and #ckcapril2025
"Crafting all day won't solve your problems... but then again, neither will cleaning and cooking!"
Happy scrapping!
~ Brandi ~
