Modifying Older Embellishments for a New Look by Alex

Hello Flair Enthusiasts!

Alex here and I do apologise for my belated post, but I do bring you a video as promised.

I'm not sure whether it's worth the wait, but you can be the judge of that.  Would you believe me that I had actually finished the filming and the layout a couple of weeks ago?  I think we're all getting the hang of having a semi-permanent recording set-up, but we're always making improvements along the way.

This layout brings together all-the-things!  What do I mean by that?  Sorta kinda killing two (or in this case more) proverbial birds with one stone!

Firstly, I used supplies from my "Counterfeit Kit" to make this layout.  You can read more about those on my blog.  The process video for today's layout is below.  You can can either watch now or after reading the post!

The next thing I manged to incorporate into the layout was the use of a sketch.  September's Product Focus in the Rediscover Your Stash group is sketches, so I tried to include them when possible.

The sketch came from Shimelle's free 4x6 Photo Love class from Two Peas days.  I stumbled across the sketch on Pinterest and upon recognizing it as one of the lessons, I had a look on her blog and there it was!  Shimelle didn't post the sketch, but she shared photos of the two layouts she made and posted them on them on her blog.  Here is Shimelle's blog post and it contains a video of this lesson.

The reason I chose this sketch is somewhat lengthy and I do go into more details on my video and my version of this blog post, but in a nutshell I thought it suited my photos except it didn't and I had to make some changes and actually ended up following the sketch more closely than I planned! 🤷

My original choice of photos didn't work out either.  Butterflies were Plan B (more about in the video)!, but it ended up for the best, because who makes butterfly flair better than EWF?  I was spoiled for choice and I don't even have all of them! 😮

I tell you, sitting down to a layout frequently takes you down a rabbit hole and it tells you what it needs.

So...back to the important bit.  Hands up if you have plenty of "vintage" stash that you can't part with.

Yeah I thought so.  I have a lot.  Today I'm reporting that I successfully got them (OK OK THREE of them) on a layout after languishing in my stash for...I don't know...maybe 6-8 years?  I have maybe 4 different packets of these rosettes.  I know I manged to use up almost a full pack some years ago, so it IS possible. 🤔

Regardless of WHAT type of item it is that you're hoarding, the important reason is to ask yourself WHY.  This will be different for everybody and may include a combination of factors.

Is it the fact that you paid money for it and don't want to feel like you're throwing money away if you get rid if it?  You don't have to throw them out.  Ask around at local schools, preschools, childcare and community centres...and hospitals too.  They often have arts and crafts type programs and are grateful for the donations.  You can feel good knowing your stuff will be enjoyed by sick kids.

Not you?  Still clutching your preciousssssesss? 🤣 (Don't worry, clearly I am too!)
hoarding it for a sentimental reason?  Are you waiting for the PERFECT project.  Larger, pre-made embellishments tend to be expensive so I can understand that.
If that's you, then I encourage you to read this article by Shimelle on what COULD happen to "special" supplies if you hold onto them too long. Gives you something to think about for sure.

What if you WANT to use them...TRY to use them, but they just look wrong every time.

That's me, BTW.  🙋🙋🙋 (Actually they're all me, but mostly the last one.)

The first tip aI have t getting something to work is to go back to the same collection.  Collections are designed to go together,  They're made so you really just need to add photos, a pen and glue.  I usually mix my collections so this is a step back and chance to refocus for me.

Chances are, if they're older supplies, you likely don't have much (if anything) left from the original collection.  So go back to manufacturer if they are still in business.  The rosettes I had were all brands under the American Crafts umbrella (I have two packs by American Crafts, one by Pebbles and one I can't remember now). Usually the colours have a certain familiarity about them.

You can also try and pull in motifs similar to those in the original collection, paying close attention to the colours.

For my part, in this particular case, I often felt they were too big...as are many supplies I LIKE, but just struggle to use (often due to size).  In this particular instance, spreading them over a two-page layout seemed like a logical way to start.  It was going to still take a bit of work since the photos took up a fair bit of space.  What I DID like about using these rosettes is that they make a perfect nest for a flair badge! 🙌

They're so old the foam pads on the back just fell off!  🤣
Many are topped with a button and the button is almost always without thread. 😱 Naked buttons make me twitchy!

As you saw in the video, I chose the colours carefully to co-ordinate with both the flair and layout itself.  The Pebbles ones had white circles with tiny "happy birthday" text that I never noticed before.  Since I don't celebrate them and it's irrelevant to the story anyway, I pulled them off.

This is where you can start to bring the supplies into the modern era by replacing the various layers with punched circles of papers from your layout.  Suddenly they don't stick out as much!

Since I was trying to draw attention to the flair badges,  I chose not to replace the circles.  The white flair against the blue/aqua looked really good. Flair, rather than buttons, gave them a fresh new look and I'm really pleased how they turned out.  I can't say the same for all the other parts, but overall pretty satisfied given  don't two page layouts

I think what I'm going to do is place all my "too hard" supplies in one basket nearby, so I'm looking at them and through them more often and don't miss opportunities to use them.  An actual "too hard" basket! 🤣🤣🤣

Oh you probably want to see the rest of the layout, right?

OK here is the title and journaling (yes I added the butterfly and black faceted gems after I stopped filming!):



And the whole spread:

The Butterfly House

BTW, here are all (or almost all) the BUTTERFLY flairs in the EWF store.  I picked some from two different sets.   Click on "Insects Birds and Animals" on the right hand side of the page.





 
 
I hope I've addressed most of the reasons why you might be holding on to supplies and how to get past this road block.  I'll see you sooner than later to get back into the swing of my blog schedule!
Leave me a comment or email if you have any questions.  I'll be happy to have a chat about it.

Love and Embellish With Flair,

--Alex xxx

Finding Inspiration Part 6 (final) by Alex

Hello Lovely Flair Enthusiasts!

Alex here with the next installment of my Lost Mojo (or Finding Inspiration) series!  If you missed the first five installments, you can find them here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Today I’m bringing you the final installment of the Finding Inspiration or “lost mojo” series.  This one will be about using challenges to find inspiration. 

There are many sites (usually in the form of a blog) which host weekly or monthly challenges.  Sometimes they’re specific like a different colour challenge each week or the type of challenge might vary.

Facebook Groups relating to scrapbooking or cardmaking or more general crafts sometimes have special challenges.  Some commonly found activities include some of the things we’ve already looked at like scraplifting and commonly sketches.  Others frequently found are things Tic TAC Toe (also referred to as bingo) (like noughts and crosses where each box contains a prompt or item to use and you can choose a line in any direction and must include those items), mood boards and many others.

In April, such a Facebook group for the store Anna’s Craft Cupboard were celebrating their 13th anniversary with a cyber crop.  There were plenty of games and challenges and I’m going to go back and complete one that I wanted to do at the time but didn’t get around to it.

There were two "Blind Crops” and for me, your pink, self confessed control freak. these are the most difficult of all!  A blind crop usually is most successful when completed “live” to eliminate the temptation to peek ahead.  The leader has everyone making a layout step by step according to their instructions!  Eg “cut paper B into a 6x8 rectangle and stick to top left of paper A”.  Supplies to have on hand are usually available for some time beforehand, although the level of detail often varies.

The designer of the blind crop I’m going to make is none other than Melinda Sweetman who is probably well known to many of you.

I’m pleased to say I didn’t cheat on terms of peeking at the finished layouts, but I had a tiny cheat which I’ll confess in due process!  The list of supplies was more or less straightforward - except I had 5 papers picked instead of 4.  One was from a paper pad and single sided, so more like 4.5! 🤦🏼‍♀️

Since I rarely pull ink, mist or paint when making up kits, I felt I could justify the “wait and see” approach” when it came to this step.

Not knowing when and how much of each paper would be used was driving me crazy!  After following the cutting and sticking for the pink and woodgrain papers, I pretty much was sure my remaining paper would be the blue/lilac striped one (in the photo cluster) and not the green one.

Once I figured out we were cutting photo mats came my cheat - not only did I use the two specified papers (would have been the woodgrain and the purple) but I decided to also cut a mat from my pink paper and my green floral “spare” paper and do messy offset mats.  I use a lot of paper layers and doing this was like a security blanket! 

At the point when texture paste was required, I went with a "frankenpaste" as I sometimes do.  I mixed Colour Blast in Snow White with Vicki Boutin’s iridescent glitter texture paste (which has a clear base).  I wasn’t super happy when it was drying a bit more translucent than I hoped after 2 steps.  Then I saw paste was required for a third step so I dried off what I had already done enough to put the stencil back exactly as it was.  I mixed a bit of Dreamweaver pearlescent embossing paste into my frankenpaste and after doing the third area I went back over the first two lightly.  This made for some thick paste and in hindsight I should have probably used a denser patterned stencil.

Here are the three pastes swatches separately.  The fine glitter in the Colour Blast is hard to see, but it's gorgeous! 

 
I also wasn’t thrilled with any of my mist choices, but didn’t want the fuss of mixing anything so I knew the shimmer pigment in Heidi Swapp Color Shine should show up even on darker paper.

I had to leave the layout to sit overnight so the thick paste could dry all the way through.  The waiting time and scant adhesive causing the pink and paper to lift a lot at the edges.  I decided to machine stitch for some extra interest.  It's subtle, but adds some texture.

I also had to stitch down the yellow Thickers (not my first choice, but I simply couldn't make the ascending letters of a scripty font work no matter what I tried. 😒

I fussy cut virtually the entire sheet of that gorgeous floral paper from Shimelle's Little by Little collection and eliminated the red flowers and kept the others.  While yellow doesn't appear in the background pattern, it definitely worked as an accent and gave me the option of yellow in the title since both pink and white alphas seemed to blend in too much.  I added the lion die cut from the same collection and some critters from Box of Crayons also by Shimelle hidden among the flowers since the photo was taken at the zoo even though the journaling isn't about the outing itself,

I left the choice of flair until later since I wasn't sure where the blind crop was going to take me.  I opted for the Captured set which was black on white.  The white was going to stand out and co-ordinate with the paste and I wanted to include some camera motifs in the embellishment clusters anyway.

I used the silver, holographic circles from the Thickers phrase set from Shimelle's Sparkle City and some sequins from Spiegelmom Scraps to finish

Embellish with Flair product used:  Captured

I'll see you again soon with something new!

Love, and embellish with flair!

Alex xx

Finding Inspiration Part 4 by Alex

Hello Lovely Flair Enthusiasts!

Alex here with the next installment of my Lost Mojo (or Finding Inspiration) series!  If you missed the first three installments, you can find them here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Today we continue to look for inspiration in work by others.  The natural progression from scraplifting would probably be a sketch, but there is something a little in between.  I'm talking about CLASSES.  Classes offered by other crafters.  These can be either face-to-face or online.

I love online classes myself as they can be worked through at your own pace and access is usually life long.  I regularly sign up for classes by other crafters.  BUT WHY?? I hear you ask! You TEACH classes, so why TAKE classes?? 🤔

Well everyone's style is different.  I believe that you never stop learning and if you don't try something new, you'll never know whether it's "your thing" or not.  Even the most well known crafters or artists can misplace their mojo for a time, and taking a class can reignite it (not to mention supporting fellow artists).

Today's layout takes inspiration from Lesson One from a class I recently signed up for called "A Touch of Whimsy" by my dear friend Sara.  Before you ask, no I didn't sign up JUST because she's my friend!  Her style is VERY different to mine and I love what she makes, but it's definitely out of my comfort zone.

💡Tip: Getting out of your comfort zone could be just what you need to get that mojo back!


I figured I'd better practice what I preach and since the last layout was a scraplift of Shimelle's (and I've taken many of her classes) which is very much within my comfort zone, I should probably show you something different!

One thing Shimelle does say about scraplifting or trying something quite different is that you still want to make it look like YOU made it when someone flips through the pages of your album. 




As a general rule.  if you've never taken an online class before, it's totally OK (and usually encouraged) to share what you make online and across the socials.  What's NOT OK is to share the actual videos, PDFs and images of the artist's layouts.  This is why I can't show you Sara's actual layout.  You may know her as Sara Scraps across the socials, but she put this little SNEAKY PEEK on her Insta so you kinda get an idea what it's about.

What do you think of when you hear the word "whimsy"?  Go ahead and tell me your thoughts in the comments.

My thoughts are:
Organic shapes rather than geometric
Curves vs sharp angles
Butterflies
Flowers
Hearts
Clouds and floaty stuff

Sara's first lesson in the class focuses on hand stitching or alternatives if you don't like to stitch.  As soon as I saw this I knew EXACTLY which photos and story I wanted to use.  I had set them aside for a layout I DID plan to hand stitch!!  What I hadn't planned on was having to SKETCH my stitching lines! 😬

Plan A was to ask my SmallCraftyDude to help, but he refused point blank upon learning I required hearts.  🙄

Plan B was to use a cut file.  Paige Evans has many cut files with the holes already there for stitching, or use the pen holder in the Silhouette to get it to sketch the design in pencil and I poke the holes myself,  That's almost like not cheating, right?  😉

Plan Q, R or perhaps S was to put on my Big Girl pants and get on with it.  Sara gave me such encouragement (and I realized I wouldn't be setting the best example by cheating), so a whole white eraser later I decided to start poking holes before I changed my mind. 💪

So, what I had in my head was inspired by this layout by Flora Farkas using one of Paige's cut files.  Except I wanted more whimsy...and I promised I'd draw it myself.  You'll see how I take inspiration from Flora's layout without exactly scraplifting it, but it does incorporate at what we looked at in the previous post about scraplifting with this one.  While I'm not exactly scraplifting the layout Sara made in Lesson 1, it's a sort of mix of hers and Flora's and turning out to be unique in its own right. 

I needed both pink and purple so it would draw attention to the colour of the dresses my nieces are wearing in the photos.  The colour is pretty washed out being taken indoors with less than ideal lighting so I wanted to draw attention to it.  The story behind these photos is about their outfits as we watched the royal wedding last year at a high tea my sister organised.

Naturally there are flairs for every possible occasion in the Embellish With Flair shop and this set called Royal Crowns even had the perfect name! 😍😍😍

The background needed to be subtle.  A white tone-on-tone was definitely on the list, but I've always swooned over this subtle yet gorgeous ombre Paper 8 from Paige Evans' "Take Me Away" collection 😍

It’s at this point where I normally start layering photo mats like crazy.  I wasn’t sure what to do here.  I didn’t want the photo block to look too heavy, but I did need to add my own touches to make it my own.  I don’t usually stack multiple photo mats ups evenly.  It looks really formal and just not “right” for most of my stories.  And another thing - I’m not sure I could stack anything evenly if I tried! 😂🤷

💡Tip: You don't have to copy a sketch, scraplift or class lesson down to the last detail.  You want to find the balance between trying something new and still being true to your style.

Since I was trying to keep the photo block reasonably small (not to cover too much of the painstakingly stitched background raiding my box of scraps (when a certain cat isn’t holding them hostage) is a perfect opportunity to pot a small dent in them!

Then I went through my die cuts and stickers and pulled out what I felt qualified as “whimsical”. I found a couple of frames from Paige Evans’ collections.  I struggle to use frames, but this time I was determined.  I backed them with patterned paper as I would a cut file and they formed a kind of bridge between the paper mats and the embellishments clusters.  

I love how most of the embellishments are small and paper based (die cuts or fussy cutting or stickers.  It makes them less heavy and more "whimsical".  I only used a single piece of chipboard and tried to keep the non paper elements delicate.

I was trying to be a little restrained there as well since part of the class lesson was to scatter little floaty bits along the stitched areas. I stitched down two butterflies with a cross stitch and attached the tiny metallic butterflies



The butterflies help make a connection between the metal flair and the more whimsical floaty elements and help them look more "at home".

Placement of embellishments was kind of decided for me since there were many areas of the stitched chains of hearts I was unhappy with. 

I put the journal in the space underneath in grey to make it less intrusive.  It’s more legible IRL I promise!  I picked an older set of Thickers by Dear Lizzy (going back to her Polka Dot Party collection) in white (trying to be soft and subtle yet girly at the same time).  Hands up if you have the song from Princess Diaries 2 in your head when you read the title? 🙋😂

Since I was unable to decide between pearls or diamantes,  I used both!  Plenty of royal jewels mix the two so on they went!  I was in two minds as to whether to add any gold mist.  I know I’ve been doing a lot of it lately, but there is a bit of gold in the die cuts and stickers so I went with it.

Here's my final outcome and I'm not entirely displeased with it!  😂👍

It was a labour of love.  Most importantly,  I achieved my aim by started off with something which looked very different to what I'd normally make, yet I was able to mould it into something that looked like it was my work and included all the things I loved...and all from taking one class!

I do encourage you to try this approach whether it be Sara's class, a different online class or a face-to-face class if you are fortunate enough to be close enough to someone who offers them!

Crowning Glory

 

 Embellish With Flair products used: Royal Crowns

That's it for today!  Hope to see you again soon with another installment in the series (I promise we're almost done!)

Love and Embellish With Flair,

xx Alex

Mini Art Journal by Suzanne Franin

Hey Everyone Suzanne here

This time for Embellish With Flair I created a Mini Art Journal great to just throw in your back with some pens or a small watercolour palette and water pens if your travelling and don't have a lot of space or time to do get much done during the day but want to wind down at night with something 

With the background, I used a mini Wire stencil from Memory Maze with some 3D gel medium 

I then used some Mushy Peas Dylusions Paint but that was a bit light, so I then used Bottle Green and Azure Impasto from Finnabair for a mix

 I added some Vanilla Custard Dylusions Paint for the paper clay scroll and then glued the butterfly flair on top of that 

I also glued some other paper clay pieces that were broken bits from other things I'd made for a pop of white then glued the bead strand on top of them 

I painted the paper clay keyhole with Jade Impasto by Finnabair and added a key

Then added some word stickers to the cover

And that's it, it's ready to go travelling with

Embellish With Flair Products I used

Butterflies Teal

Thank you for visiting I hope you will come back soon x