Author: Sheena Rowlands

Is it too early to mention the C word?

Do you craft for Christmas or document your Christmas?

Have you already started getting organised?

Whilst out and about today I noticed that some Christmassy things are making their way into the shops in town! I know its September & its getting colder, but Christmas, really!!

You may not already know this but I made cards for years before turning to scrapbooking. So at this time of year, once the children were back at school I would set up shop on the kitchen table & make ALL our Christmas cards by hand. Usually making one design & reproducing it. Here are a few examples of Christmas cards I’ve made in the past. These days I only send a few to close family & friends.

More recently I’ve started making some of my Christmas gifts usually by quilting or crochet. A lot of time & love goes into them & people certainly like receiving handmade gifts. This was one of the first crochet gifts I made.

As a scrapbooker I like to record my christmases too. For many years I did my version of Journal my Christmas but since I started doing Project Life I didn’t feel the need to document our Christmases in 2 places. Here are a couple of pages from our Christmas last year. I particularly love how looking through PL brings back all the memories.

Do you make things for Christmas or document it each year? we would love to hear what you do x

Sheena x

Do you have these in your stash?

What is your most and least used tools?

When I first started out in scrapbooking I just armed myself with a pencil, scissors and glue and bought my 12 x 12″ paper from our local garden centre, the less said about that the better!!

But over the years I’ve amassed an array of fancy tools and gadgets designed for this hobby of ours and I have to be honest & say lots of them are now gathering dust.

Why has this happened?

Have the newer tools consigned the older ones to the scrap heap or is it more a case of out of sight, out of mind or new & shiny is the best…

If I had to list my top 5 used tools then my Silhouette Cameo would be one, two & three!! I do love the versitility of this machine and tend it use it to cut something for most of my scrapbook pages.

Also on my list would be my trusty old Big Shot. It seems to me that thin metal dies have made a come back even with so many electronic cutters on the market. I do like the crisp edges a metal die gives particularly to an intricate shape.

Also on my list would be my Guillotine for cutting 12 x 12″ paper as I like straight lines & after trying lots of trimmers, I prefer this sort of cutter.

So what do I own that I no longer use?

My fancy edged scissors have become an ornament, standing all bright & colourful in a pot! I could never get them to cut well, maybe its because I’m a left hander?

I have a gadget for binding mini books somewhere which I’m not totally sure why I bought it as I rarely make any sort of book!

When did I last set an eyelet? goodness knows & I’m not sure where I’d lay my hand on the setter tools either!

What tools do you use all the time or discarded along the way?

We’d love to hear from you x

Sheena x

This post is not sponsored by any product or manufacturer and all comments are the personal opinion of the author.

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The Early Bird catches the worm…

They say that the early bird catches the worm…. well in our case one of our early bird delegates, who books onto the Amy Tan workshop will randomly win £50.00 of Hey Little Magpie vouchers!

Yes, you heard it right, £50.00 worth of Hey Little Magpie vouchers!

You might ask why?

It’s as a special 1st birthday gift for one individual from Birds of a Feather.

Today we are 1 years young!

Today is the first anniversary of Birds of a Feather taking flight, when 3 friends decided to take a much talked about idea and become organisers of scrapbooking retreats and workshops that we would want to attend ourselves!

We thought we’d like to treat one of our supporters as a thank you to everyone who has helped and attended our events over the last year.

What better way to celebrate our 1st birthday than to offer Hey Little Magpie vouchers to the lucky winner as we all need more stash 🙂

As you may have seen, we are running an early bird offer on our Amy Tan workshop?

The early bird offer finishes tonight, August 4th at 12.00pm midnight!

So don’t hang around, don’t dilly dally, and secure your place today!

It’s the only way you can be eligible to get your name into the draw for the £50.00 of Hey Little Magpie vouchers.

As they say, you’ve got to be in it to win it x

Looking forward to seeing you there

Sheena, Sam & Jackie xxx

See 1, Do 1, Teach 1…

In my nursing profession, ‘see one, do one, teach one’ was a well known phrase for how knowledge was passed on and new skills learnt. Over the years I have gained lots of new skills this way and passed them on to my fellow colleagues.

I believe this is where my love of teaching has sprung from. I love nothing more than sharing my scrapbooking pages for Birds of a Feather, with other like minded people and maybe teaching them new skills and techniques along the way.

At our recent Birds of a Feather retreat I got the chance to teach on both Saturday and Sunday to a lovely group of ladies and we had a laugh whilst they relaxed and created my classes.

One of my favourite layouts was using the Crate Paper, Heart Day range and a technique for making glue frames.

Another class I taught using American Crafts, Dear Lizzy – Lovely Day involved hand wrapped frames which certainly tested a few but gave us chance to chat and craft.

I’m looking forward to teaching again this November and the planning is well underway for the classes I’m designing.

Sheena xxx

Be our Guest…

…be our guest, be our guest…

I can’t help but sing this Beauty & the Beast song in my head when I think  about the term “Guest Designer”.

For our recent May Retreat we were thrilled to have the talented

Wilna Furstenburg

as our very first Guest Designer.

Now we would have loved to have met Wilna in person & have her teach here in the UK but we achieved the next best thing & Wilna taught us her own unique style via a video link in our classroom.

Wilna not only designed for us 2 unique layouts, she also designed an exclusive print & cut file of watercolored flowers just for us.

Not to miss out on all the fun, us Birds also created Wilnas layouts for ourselves & I thought I’d share mine here with you.

Lovely.

Our first layout certainly had me out of my comfort zone & doing techniques I’d not tried before. Which is exactly what I love about doing a class with a guest designer.

Created using paint, Maggie Holmes Chasing Dreams & our exclusive cut file.

Happy.

Our second layout with Wilna.

I felt my confidence growing, following Wilna’s techniques for this layout & I tweaked the colours used to co ordinate with my photo.

Created using paint, Maggie Holmes Chasing Dreams & our exclusive cut file.

The classes were very well received by our delegates and the majority felt they had learnt new techniques to take forward into their future scrapbooking.

So many thanks to Wilna.

I really hope we get to meet some day xxx

Till next time

Sheena x