A Short Departure to the Past

I'm breaking with the rule of only using current Stampin'Up! items on this blog, because I really want to highlight something. I made these albums for both sets of Grandbadgers for Christmas, and I was really pleased with how they turned out.  But that's not why I'm sharing.

Designer Series Paper.  Like most people, I buy more than I need and not as much as I want.  Some packs are "saved" because they are just too pretty, while others are bought and used for a specific project or class.  But very rarely do I use a whole pack, which means that I have several boxes full of part-packs of retired papers, often the ones I wasn't particularly drawn to immediately on opening the pack.

BUT, so often these can be used together!  Stampin'Up!'s colour coordination means that it's really easy to mix, match and still have a beautifully coordinated end product.

Did you know that in every DSP pack each paper has a bold side, patterned to coordinate with the stamps in the suite, but it also has a more generic side, often with a smaller or more subtle pattern?  It's these that often go really well together when using up bits and pieces.

For the monochrome-on-green album below I used DSP from... wait for it... EIGHT different packs!  But they were all monochrome, and I love how they all looked together: although the styles were very different, the black-and-white pulled it all together very satisfyingly.  And the Grandbadgers thought so too.