What helps you "kill" a kit, use your stash or create more?

"What helps you create more and shop less?"

My first instinct is to say apparently NOTHING helps me shop less! But, I am committed to using what I have.

One thing that helped me use up supplies is sorting by color when I am almost done with something. I have some clear boxes for each color. When I have used most of a kit or collection, all the embellishments get sorted into the boxes by color. I cut up the sticker sheets to do the same. I don't do it for specific items - like Halloween.

I have found myself using things I would never would have found when I need a little something yellow, for example.

What helps me is limiting supplies a bit - so either using a kit, or putting together some coordinating products from my stash, using a sketch or jumping off point to get me started and just printing out photos!

I really like the Counterfeit Kit Club for inspiring my creativity. I need to see something new or something old in a new way to inspire me to use it so instead of shopping at the LSS, I shop my stash. Actually putting my hands on the ingredients I have on hand really helps me visualize putting it to use.

As far as shopping less, I seriously had to unsubscribe to a lot of things. Decreasing the amount of scrap shopping content I saw helped whittle down my wish list. And lately, in the past year or so, scrap style and some products have cycled back around so luckily, everything old is new again.

I would say what helps me use more of my stuff is 1) knowing what I have, and 2) knowing where it is! I have a lot of cool stuff that has been holed up in boxes for what feels like forever. Just being able to get it all unpacked and (semi) sorted has forced me to actually look at it and decide if I still love it and will I realistically use it? Now that I know what I've got and it's all in labeled bins (which need to be sorted down further eventually), I finally know where it is too.

For a lot of my stuff, the answer to will I still use it was still "Yes!" even though some of it is older than the hills. I bought it because I liked it and had an idea of the pictures I'd use it for. And for myriad reasons I haven't been able to scrap much of my multiple thousands of photos over the years. So, when I finally do get around to scrapping all of those photos from the '80's, '90's, '00's and this decade, I'll have scrapping stuff that is about that old to scrap them with! Ha!

If I have no discretionary money, I don't go anywhere which means I don't buy anything. If I don't have any time, I don't go anywhere which means I don't buy anything. But given the means and the opportunity, I will usually find something I just have to have. 

There's some great ideas on this thread!

Something that helps me is to keep a little basket with my most recent purchases in it. Right now it has all of my Tuesday Morning purchased embellies in it and I've been pulling little bits onto every project I've created the last couple of months. If I immediately sort it into my stash, I sort of forget about it unless I go hunting for the item specifically. You could do the same thing with product from your stash that you want to use, or tools, so that you are reminded to grab those things as you work.

I'm no longer getting a traditional kit club kit. I did start getting Scrapbook Generation's Boy Crazy kit club monthly (comes with two layout kits, with color photo and sketches) and I've been using them right away, which is awesome. No backlog! I have so many pics of DS to do that it has been working great. It really takes a lot of time for me to design a page from scratch, so this cuts that down considerably. What I do with those is immediately go through my digi picks and find some that work with the kits, edit them to the sizes on the instructions, print them, and put them with the kits. I then do them pretty shortly after that, either at a crop or when I have some down time.

I also will plan a huge photo order and sketch layouts for those pics (or PL pages), including pulling product into kit bags. Once my pictures come, I immediately sort those into my kits. I then have a TON to work on. I take them to crops, or grab one during my Saturday morning "me time" and get scrapping. Because the planning part takes me so very long to do, this speeds me up to the fun part for me, which is the assembly. The stinky part about doing this is I want to pull my hair out when I'm planning and editing all those pictures!!! But the result is worth it.

I've been doing this with some of my older supplies and all the last items from various packages.  If I pull out an embellishment and don't end up using it on the layout I toss it in a dish on my desk.  It's really helped me use up some otherwise random stuff and I find that I go here first to look for embellishments for my pages.  Over the weekend I put away all the pieces that were in my dish and have started a new pile again this week to get some fresh inspiration.

updated with a 11x8 layout and some changes to the 12x12

I do not normally watch scrapbooking videos or buy kits, but I read ndmomrn 's post about Mercy Tiara videos and decided to try some. I first thought, "Wow, this is so far from the way I scrapbook! Maybe what I do isn't even scrapbooking."
I even thought of a new name for what I do: photojournaling. She uses a tiny 2x2 photo on a 12x12 page with so much product. I now see why some complain about how much scrapbooking costs and about buying freezes. I use big photos or lots of small photos and hardly any product normally.

So, I said that to tell you, I was inspired to try to lift one of her layouts. I had some leftover photos from my latest project that I wanted to use.
Here is the pintrest that she was using for her inspiration:




Here is what I came up with....still way more photos, but I couldn't bring myself to put one tiny little photo on a 12x12 yet. Would love to have your input if you see some place I could put more product!

I know I'd create more if I wasn't trying to organize my stash.  I'd easily "kill" a kit if I knew where everything was or if it was easily accessible.  There's nothing more frustrating than knowing you have the perfect paper/embellishment somewhere and you spend so much time looking for it, that it eventually "kills" your creativity instead.

This is me, 100%. My current "project" is getting stuff out of moving boxes and sorted into the themes I scrap. It's taking way too long, but there's no easy way around it. I have to just plow straight through. At least I can see a tiny pinhole of light at the end of the tunnel now.   Most of my stuff is unpacked and somewhat sorted. Still have a lot of junk to get rid of and a lot more that will need to be sorted down more (general "travel" into specific destinations, etc.) and decide where it should all go now that I have storage for it set up. I'm hoping that I'll be actually scrapping again before summer is over. That would make me insanely happy.

@elaynef - I don't scrapbook that way, either. I did enjoy her videos. I like what you did.

I don't like when the photo seems to get lost in the layout, so I am not into using tons of product on a page.