Revisiting Older Products in Your Stash

Hi - Nicole here waving to everyone!!!  This is my very first post for the Scrap Your Scraps blog and I'm super excited to be here with all this amazing talent going on!

Today I would like to talk about something very near and dear to my heart - older products in our stash.  I know, it's not a trendy thing to discuss.  Most of us all see the new releases throughout the scrappy seasons and our hearts go pitter patter and our wallets cry out for mercy (or at least MINE does with Simple Stories...but that's a whole other blog post... lol ).

I'm sure many of us can remember trips to our local scrapbook stores or big box stores and finding ourselves oohing and aahing over the beautifully displayed NEW products.  Grabbing two sheets of every paper in a line, and of course every. single. embellishment.   Fast forward a few years - and those products are still waiting for the "perfect" page or project to magically happen.  I don't know about anyone else, but I have recently found myself embracing the freedom of older products.

I would challenge anyone reading this to take a trip down memory lane in your stash and revisit items or collections that you have been holding on to for some time and look at them with fresh eyes and ideas.  Let go of the idea of the "perfect page/product" and use them NOW.  (As long as you still love these products of course, I recently sold a lot of stash that I was no longer excited about).

I'm going to share a few pages that I have done in the last few months with older products; things that have been out for awhile and are not the latest lines available.

For this double page (sketch from Scrapbook Generation), I used an older collection pack by Echo Park - and I'm not sure how old, but I bought it at a convention and those never have recent releases - at least the ones that come through my town...

I also paired the papers and stickers up with tons of older stickers and some ribbon from my stash.

For this single page (sketch #318 from Nuts about Sketches), I used older Bella Blvd halloween collections and stickers - these came in a warehouse box from 2013 so I know a few of the papers are pretty old!

Here is the process video for this layout:

Since I already had all the Bella Blvd halloween stuff out, I grabbed some of the Witch Hazel collection by October Afternoon (also from a warehouse box/santa sack = OLD!) and created a double page (sketch #319 from Nuts about Sketches).  

 

For this one - I did use newer papers that came in my monthly kit from 3 Scrappy boys, but I paired it with a LOT of older embellishments from my stash.  I love mixing new and old together.  It's a nice surprise to find older things in my stash that I still love, am inspired by AND they work well with newer items.

 

So go and check out your stash and try to find some older products that you may have forgotten about or have been saving for something "special" that just didn't happen - and make SOMETHING, ANYTHING, just use those older supplies and enjoy the process!

  Nicole Bingaman
   Creative Team Member of SCRAP YOUR SCRAPS

I loved that Nicole went back and revisited some of her old supplies and I decided that I needed to do the same.  A little backstory,  I have only done one major online order since starting scrapbooking, and that was in 2010.  I don't really have the money or access to buy new products all the time :(  but I do work at a store that sells scrap supplies, so that is where I pretty much get all my supplies from, although they're not new releases or anything, so I guess what I'm trying to say is I have A LOT of old supplies, that I just never use. 
 

 For this layout I went back to an older collection from Cosmo Cricket called Nutmeg.  I loved it when I bought it forever ago but never found the right layout for it.  I used it for the small scraps behind the pictures, and used some stickers from the same collection, and I used the Basic Grey Konnichiwa line for the background paper.  The bows and owl embellishment are new, and the leaves are old. . . VERY old. I am loving this layout and can't wait to break out more of my older stash and get scrapping.  Thanks so much for the inspiration Nicole.

   Cathy Martin
  Creative Team Member of SCRAP YOUR SCRAPS