Amy Tan – Birds of a Feather

Vlogged memories of our Amy Tan workshop…

Whilst many of us can relate to the ‘curve balls’ that life throws us from time to time, equably many of us find that a craft is a welcome distraction!

And if you’re reading this, like us Birds of a Feather, you probably share a love of scrapbooking?

We have met some fabulous people whilst sharing the love of this hobby and I’m sure that there will be many more friendships to discover in the future.

Two such ladies who we met recently at our Amy Tan workshop were Claire and Georgia. These ladies ‘vlog’…. and if like me you’re not familiar with ‘vlogging’ the easiest way to describe it a video diary or a filmed blog!

Like scrapbooking, Claire and Georgia’s vlog styles are very different. I can’t categorically say why but they just are!

Having already watched Claires’ vlog, Georgia’s vlog is equally as great… It gives you an insight into so much more than simply the workshop, starting with a tube ride, then onto her hotel room for the night and dinner at Pizza Express, all before any filming of Amy Tan or indeed the workshop!

Why not watch it yourself and see if you agree with me?

Either way, it brings back some amazing memories…

From Amy demonstrating her wonderful talent and techniques to a reminder about just how packed full of lush stash the kit really was, not to mention the adorable Amy Tan herself… Her character is infectious, as is her laugh!

She chose to share some of her curve balls with us on that weekend, but her amazing and positively strong outlook on life gives others the feel good factor that Amy exudes so well!

Sadly for Georgia, today it is the funeral of her brother in law. He didn’t have enough ‘magic and sparkle’ in his life and felt there was no other way out…

Georgia has been crowd funding to raise money for his funeral. If you would like to make a donation, please visit his just giving page.

Think we would all benefit from a bit of Amy Tan ‘magic and sparkle’ in our lives… I know that I for one certainly felt blessed t have been in her company that weekend and can’t wait until our paths cross again!

The mad cow with the stats is back!

Hard to believe, but it is a fortnight since we greeted Amy Tan at Birmingham New Street station!

In our opinion, the weekend was a massive success, with umpteen positive comments and messages, along with so many happy faces… even just typing this, my mind is flooded with so many happy thoughts!

As always, we really value your feedback. All comments, ideas and thoughts are taken on board to better the experience for everyone on our next retreat, which by the way is only in a weeks’ time! Yikes!!!

Anyway, back to our Amy Tan workshop…

We ask everyone to rate a set number of criteria, 5 being excellent and 1 being unsatisfactory….

We were delighted that 82% of you gave the Chateau Impney 5 stars as a location, ideally situated just off junction 5 of the M5.

92% of you lovely ladies scored the food 4 stars or above. The ‘breakfast butties’ went down exceptionally well, a great energy boost to a very busy day, which even included a Travellers Notebook!

100% of you scored the crop room space as 4 stars or above, with over 90% of you giving the room a big thumbs up no. 5. We were delighted to be located in The Elizabethan suite – blimey that room was so big you could crop, party and have a disco all at the same time LOL!

Comfort of the crop room also scored top marks, with 100% of you scoring it at 4 stars or above…

The teaching space and the classes both equally scored 5 stars by 94% of you – the classes were totally down to Amy, so massive thanks there Miss Tan xoxo!

WOW is the word that best describes the Hustle & Heart kits… 98% of you scored it as 5 stars, with some of you adding a + sign! Rammed with lusciousness and products galore, I’d like to see the first lady that uses her kit up completely!

And I can tell you that it won’t be me, Jackie or Sheena as we all succumbed and raided the Hey Little Magpie on-site shop and purchased the 16 papers that weren’t included in Amy’s kit. Hard to believe I know, but the hustle & Heart collection has a massive 24 different 12 x 12″ papers!

So would you recommend us again? Indeed you would… In fact 98% of you lovely ladies rated the overall workshop as 4 stars or more!

Thank you to all who completed our questionnaire and we look forward to seeing you real soon – some of you in seven days!!!

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Memories of a wonderful weekend….

It seems very hard to believe that this time last week we had arrived at Chateau Impney, were busy setting up for our Amy Tan weekend workshop.

Driving up to the Chateau still makes my skin tingle – it really is such an amazing building set in the heart of Worcestershire…

Amy really didn’t have much time in the UK at all – she flew into Heathrow on the Thursday, spent the day with Shimelle last Friday and then returned to London on Sunday and back to LA last Monday. That’s some serious travelling in such a short space of time!

The Saturday ladies…

And the Sunday ladies…

Mind you, we had plenty of time to get to know Amy, when we met her at Birmingham New Street Station last Friday! What an epic journey that was! We were mightily excited to meet Amy and had left in plenty of time. However we didn’t account for the standstill we found ourselves in the middle of in central Birmingham!

It was so bad that Sheena and Jackie resorted to jumping our of my car and walking directly around the standstill to get to New Street – crossing over a couple of roundabouts… comical now looking back!

I had managed to finally crawl to New Street station and after observing other cars do a three point turn right outside the main John Lewis New Street entrance, I threw down the gauntlet and joined in! Unlike some of the larger vehicles, ‘Betty’ my little Fiat 500 did her three point turn with very little effort!

We finally delivered a jet lagged Amy back to the Chateau at around 21.30. Fun, laughter and cocktails ensued with the fabulous Sarah and Lianne from Hey Little Magpie. They had bought their delicious ‘pop-up’ shop to the Chateau and this did not fail to disappoint causing a dent in many delegates pockets!

Still what would be a scraping workshop without copious amounts of fabulous scrapping stash?

Amy’s Hustle & Heart kit was rammed with delicious stash too, over £90 worth of goodies, so even after making four fabulous layouts and being introduced to a Travellers Notebook, there was masses of the kit left!

A truly fabulous weekend – what a memory!

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And we have our first vlog!

A big thank you to Claire Murphy, aka Scrappy Nerd UK for introducing us to the wonderful world of vlogging!

For those of you not in the know, or for those of you who thought predictive text had been un-predictive, vlogging is in layman’s terms video blogging!

Here at Birds of a Feather we love it, not just because Claire’s vlog has documented the amazing weekend we shared with Amy Tan (although that is mighty special) but because we got an insight into Claire’s world!

It’s like an unedited episode of Big Brother, but whereas the housemates are all filmed, they would be filming themselves!

Claire currently has over 1700 subscribers to her You Tube site, let’s aim to get her to 2000 followers real soon!

We’ve had some amazing feedback which we will update you all on very soon, but in the meantime why not take a quick trip down memory lane and remind yourselves of the wonderful experience we all shared.

And if you weren’t lucky enough to be a part of our fabulous weekend at the stunning Chateau Impney, why not sit down with a cuppa and see for yourself what you missed!

My new little motor even gets filmed – see if you can work out which car she is, as Ive aptly named her ‘Betty Blue Eyes!’

Ultimately weekends like this are all about meeting old friends and making new ones… In fact, Claire and Georgia hadn’t met Roxy, all of whom feature in the vlog until we put a call out for a car share for Roxy… Claire and Georgia said that they were more than happy to give her a lift and arranged to meet up at a local crop, prior to the Amy Tan event! How cool is that?

It’s through scrapbooking that us three Birds of a Feather met – who knows who we’ll meet next?

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I got the ephemera tiger…

…which should be sung to the tune of the Katy Perry song “I got the eye of the tiger” LOL!

And you’re gonna hear us ROAR, because only yesterday, Amy Tan was finally able to send us an image of the kit for our forthcoming workshop with her at Chateau Impney, Worcestershire.

In case you hadn’t heard (where have you been in the world of scrapbooking?) but we have managed to secure the amazingly talented Amy to come over to the UK and teach on behalf of Birds of a Feather!

The kit image is still missing a few items but is already rammed with stash and has an RRP of over £80.

Amy is teaching four layouts as well as giving you an insight into a Travellers Notebook. And, if all goes according to plan she is also hoping to give a lesson in her iconic, hand painted script font!

Can you Adam and Eve it?

How adorable is the Hustle & Heart Ephemera?

And these 3D Stickers melt my heart – they are simply delightful!

Not to mention the Enamel Pins? What’s not to love about an enamel pineapple or typewriter…

Even the gorgeous, dinky suede effect bows are super cute – I’m guessing that there may be a few left over in the kit. I for one am totally glad about this as I would struggle to use them all up!

However, if I did I could always head straight to the Hey Little Magpie shop and buy another set!

If you didn’t know, the Hey Little Magpie shop will be on site at Chateau Impney! Such a bonus for our bank balance!

The kit so far contains:

7 patterned papers
1 gold die-cut paper
Cardstock
3D diamond wood veneer shapes
Layered sticker pack
Sticker book
Ephemera
Enamel pins
Glitter phrases
Inflated ephemera (think puffy stickers and you’re nearly there!)
Faux suede bows
Museum pins
Pom pom stickers

Reminds me of the Generation Game!

We do still have a couple of spaces left on both days, so why not come and ROAR with us?

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Dream It : Plan It : Book It :

Well… we had the idea, set the wheels in motion, and after several emails Amy Tangerine is coming to teach two fantastic workshops for us, here in the UK.

Ahhh !!!! Can you hear us scream !!!! and doing a happy dance, we have booked our next workshop, with Amy Tangerine – can you believe it?

Birds of a Feather have got this fabulous international designer, the one and only Amy Tan to teach a workshop for the first time in the UK!!!

We are over the moon… all the planning has come together and we can welcome Amy to Birmingham in October 2017 along with all the delegates who are eager to not only meet her in person, but to attend a workshop by her. And there is a lot of you!

For those of you who do not know Amy Tan, she started her design career making handcrafted T-shirts under a line called Amy Tangerine, selling her feature designer T-shirts in 100’s of retail outlets. In 2007, she decided to branch out into the scrapbooking industry and has gone from strength to strength and hit every corner of the scrapbooking world with her amazing stylish collections.

For several years now, she as had her own scrapbooking paper range under the American Crafts name. Her current collection, launched this Summer, is called ‘Hustle & Hearts’ which is the collection that she will be using at our Birds of a Feather workshop.

You can find more details about Amy on her blog here

We do still have places available, so check here for all the relevant information for the workshop, or if you require further information please contact info@birdsofafeather.uk.com and we will be happy to help.

Jackie xxx

And the Winner is …..

To celebrate our first year in business we offered an early bird booking opportunity, to win a £50 Hey Little Magpie voucher if you booked and paid for the Amy Tangerine Workshop before 4th August 2017.

The draw was done on 7th August 2017 by random generator and the winner was No. 34, who is Kay Hall.

Congratulations Kay, we will be in touch with your prize.

We still have availability on the workshop, full details can be found under the workshop tab above.

Jackie xxx

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

Amy Tan is coming to the UK!

OMG, goodness knows how we’ve done it, Amy Tan is coming to the UK to exclusively teach for Birds of a Feather…

Can you ‘Adam ‘n’ Eve’ it? (Amy, for your benefit, that’s cockney rhyming slang for ‘believe it’)

We can’t wait to see what Amy designs for all you lucky ladies… We certainly drool over her beautiful, hand painted phrases!

We simply can’t believe it’s happening!

Amy has a captivating style and such an engaging way! Having looked at some of her recent IG posts, it seemed apt to include this post – hope you don’t mind Amy?

As well as being able to bring the lovely Amy to the UK, we’ve managed to secure the most impressive of locations, ideally positioned just a short distance from junction 5 off the the M5… the Chateau Impney

Tempted to book?

All you need to know is on our workshops page…

In the meantime, check out the advert for more details.

But don’t delay – snooze you lose… and spaces are limited!

Looking forward to seeing you there…

Jackie, Sam and Sheena xxx