That much anticipate moment has arrived; your Cocoa Daisy kit has landed on your doorstep!! Wahoo!! Now what? What do you do? Are you the type of person who rushes downstairs, throws open the door with scissors in hand, armed and ready to break into it or are you more of the calm, cool collected type who stashes it away somewhere until dinner and the dishes are behind you, the kids are in bed and you can savor the unboxing of each and every piece carefully?

I can’t contain my enthusiasm. I’m stalking the arrival of my kit long before it even arrives on my doorstep. Oh! The beauty of tracking numbers! I follow that precious pizza box from the moment Christine sends the beloved “you have a package” email to the moment it says “out for delivery”. I usually bet the postman to the door and am waiting with open arms!

My box and I scurry up the stairs and the unboxing begins. Sure, I have seen it all, I know what the contents of my kit are but seeing them in person is oh! so exciting! It’s like having your long anticipated house guests finally arrive! I do clear my scrap space of whatever project will be imminently neglected for my Cocoa Dasiy goodness, that much spare time, I do create.

First thing out of the box is usually my main kit. Everything is spread out on the desk. Then each of the papers is examined front and back and flipped to show the side that really grabs me. I try and pair the papers into groupings of three or four by color. This is a process that is probably very similar to what Christine does when she creates the groupings that are often seen on reveal night. I get my kit before her pairings are offered so it’s fun for me to see how similar some of my pairings end up being.

I have two storage pieces that I typically use for “work in progress” kits; a desk caddy for all the larger elements such as letter stickers, Day in the Life cards and 6×6 papers, and in the case of the February kit the Build Your Own Add On elements that I supplemented my kit with. I try and arrange product in height order so that most of each product is visible, This makes matching and adding as the foundations of my layouts are created and built up easy with as little searching as possible. High visibility increases the likelihood of that fine tuning of embellishments being added to the project at hand.

My second storage or piece of kit containment is packaging from something I bought at the store. I honestly cannot remember what it was, a desert of some type but the specifics evade me. I use the six cups on the left hand side for the Day in The Life die cuts, labels, ribbons and smaller embellishments while the larger, top half is handy for the packaged embellishments, scraps of pieces as I create (tag bottoms, cut outs, etc). If I happen to be creating at a crop, I can put the larger elements on top of the cups and close it up for portability. What you don’t see in here, are the exclusive stamps. They typically go into the top, or larger half, of this container. I do often pull out matching ink colors so as to not have to scrounge around for them as I’m designing.

Once papers are set aside, I do often go through the Day in The Life cards and match specific cards to the papers are well. This is all done my color. I often match complementary colors. At this point, I still don’t have specific pictures in mind, I’m thinking color groups.

I then shuffle through the recesses of my mind and “moments” category of my iPhone pictures for recent events and colors that work with the groupings I have created. For example, the layout above, it began with that patterned and those exact three cards as a grouping. I had originally intended the layout to be somewhat monochromatic however the picture I chose to use changed the direction I headed with this layout. It is not a great picture but I really wanted to scrap this moment and that was the only picture I had. Circumstance dictated that this was to be a one photo layout. I really liked how the Fancy Pants die cut found in the Main Kit embellishments popped by daughters red cap in the picture and from there, more color was added to the what was once going to be monochromatic layout.

Bits and pieces came out from my set up from there to further embellish the layout. Having quick visibility of many of the bits and pieces and already established groupings of patterned papers and DITL cards makes creating with Cocoa Daisy kits so painless and rewarding. Christine has done a lot of the work in her selections, your job as owner and designer of the pre-selected kits is to personalize and refine that process even further.

I hope you enjoyed a peek into my unboxing and creative process! I would love to hear what you do with your kit once it arrives. Do you have special storage for it or does it stay in box?

Thanks for popping into the Patch and joining me today!