Flamingo Five: Pink Paislee Mistletoe & Co.

Welcome to our this month's Flamingo Five! Five items... lots of creative points of view!! Miss our other installments? Check them out here. Shall we get started with our festive Christmas edition?!

December's Flamingo Five items are:

1 and 2.  Two sheets pf Pink Paislee Mistletoe & Co. patterned paper

3. Garnet elines

4. Gunmetal stickles

5. Grab bag with blue primas, red primas, blue lace and a Maya Road Star stickpin

All items available at Flamingo Scraps (limited quantities on hand!). We all started with these supplies and the instructions to make something using all five items. Any other items could be added to complete the project.



Are you ready to see what we made?!

Janet's take:

From Flamingo Scraps: Flamingo Five items

Other Supplies: Making Memories Vintage findings; Teresa Collins Blingage; Ribbon from Savvy n Sassy; Prima Pebbles

I LOVE Pink Paislee paper and I thought I would like to use it some other way than just a layout. So why not a pretty holiday decor item?  I had this 7 Gypsies Printer Tray that I thought would do just the trick. I got busy and cut up the paper and journal cards and even the beautiful lace and decorated the tray and I think it will be a wonderful addition to my Christmas decorations this year!

By using the Stickles, a piece of transparency and a Bazzill template I was able to create my own flourishes too. Just let the stickles dry and cut it out.

Tiffany's take:

From Flamingo Scraps: Flamingo Five items

And here are some close ups!

Amanda's take:

From Flamingo Scraps: Flamingo Five items

I made this tag to put in my December Daily album.  My niece Abigail, unlike her brother, is hanging out until her due date next week... so I definitely expect her to be my favorite "Christmas gift" this year! :)  The flower looks really black in the picture but it's really a deep red color in person!  You can see a little better in this photo:

I can't wait to add it to my December Daily album next week!

Suzanne's take:

From Flamingo Scraps: Flamingo Five items

Other supplies: Spellbinders die; Tim Holtz rosette die; Sizzix dove die; tassle

It is amazing what you can do with just two pieces of paper and a few fabulous embellishments!  This banner was made with a Maya Road Frayed Canvas Banner Album as the base, the paper from Flamingo Five was trimmed into six triangles and adhered to the canvas, left over paper was cut with Spellbinders scalloped circle dies, a dove sizzix die and Tim Holtz rosette sizzix die.  The letters are Tim Holtz Grunge Alphas sprayed with regular black spray paint.  Gunmetal stickles, Garnet E-line bling, Prima Flowers, Fancy Pants lace and Maya Road Star stickpin from Flamingo Five grab bag and a miscellaneous tassle complete the banner which is strung on grosgrain ribbon.  It is now hanging on my mantle!!!!

So here we are at the end of our fourth Flamingo Five and we hope you enjoyed it! Please come back and join us on the 15th of next month to see what we made with a new batch of five goodies from Flamingo Scraps! We hope that we have inspired you and we'd love to see what you make if you do, so please stop by and share it with us!

Flamingo Scraps -- Your Source for CREATIVITY!!!

Here at Flamingo Scraps -- we don't just sell scrapbook supplies, we ARE scrappers and paper crafters.  Our store grew naturally out of our desire to encourage other people to discover the joy, creativity, self expression, and preservation of memories that fuel our love of this fabulous hobby.  How restrictive then, would we be, if all we did was try to get you to buy buy buy -- what we really want is for you to create create create!!!  This is one of the main reasons behind our growing collection of grab bags, altering mediums, stamps, rubons, stickers, and embellishments like gears and ephemera.  The beauty of these products is that they can be used as is or combined to make your own unique items.

A few of our favorite things from Flamingo Scraps you can
use to create your own unique embellishments -- 7 Gypsies gears, ephemera and rubons; Prima flowers, bling, and stamps; Tattered Angels alterable ephemera,Glimmer Mists, Glaze and Glam; Maya Road Glitter, Chandelier Beads, Maya Mist, and Trinket Pins; Tim Holtz Distress Inks, and our Fabulous Flamingo Grab Bags!

As happenstance would have it our business began with making our own embellishments and selling them on eBay and on consignment.   Our love for creating our own embellishments has only grown as we have grown as paper crafters.  Here are some of our favorite things created with items from Flamingo Scraps and some tips and techniques for making them.

Just LOVING the new Prima Chicken Wire and Script stamps as backgrounds for tags (sizzix die cuts, distressed packing tags).  Tim Holtz distress inks add depth, color, and can tie diverse elements together.  Save and use your scraps of that gorgeous paper from Flamingo Scraps  for layered flowers and to cut tags, and dig into your stash of vintage-ish stickers and embellies -- or better yet, order up one of Flamigo Scraps Fabulous Grabs! 

Too Much???  Well, some of us can never have too much bling!  Packing tag was distressing using an experimental concoction of water, brown acrylic paint, brown Maya Mist, and bronze Glimmer Mist -- the tag was crumpled while still damp and the wrinkles highlighted with brown ink!

Close up of distressed packing tags with ephemera!

One of our favorite embellishments is watch crystals with items embedded in them with Crackle, Plain, and Sepia Glossy Accents!  The first one of these we made was in 2004 embedding a Euro from our Italy Mission Trip in a crystal.

Another long time favorite handmade embellie uses the fantastic Ranger microscope slide products -- frames, glass panes, and the new keepsake pockets!  Just discovered the 1" sets which can also be used to made bracelets!  These are really not as bulky as they may seem and make great pendants as well!  If you love these too -- let us know -- we don't carry them now, but we are always open to what our customers want!

So don't just think of Flamingo Scraps as a scrapbook store, think of it as your go-to source for CREATIVITY!!!

Inspiration -- Always A Work In Progress!

Inspiration, Mojo, whatever you choose to call it, for scrapping and crafting can flood in in overwhelming waves, and just as quickly dry up and float away.  Both states of mind call for an inspiration "bank" if you will.  When you are filled with ideas, when you see something (anything) that sparks an idea, that is the time to fill your bank so you have some Mojo in reserve for those droughts!  I was inspired by Susan, who keeps a scrap journal (adorable altered notebook), by Psychomom Tonya, who made a fabulous multi-media journal for her daughter, and by 7 Gypsies fabulous journal pages and book covers, to create my own Inspiration Book. 

Cover
7 Gypsies Ruban Book Covers, Very large Binding Rings, Tim Holtz Distress Inks, Misc. "Inspire" Rubon, 7 Gypsies sticker, vintage flamingo stickers, tulle.

Not wanting to run out of room and wanting to always be able to update my book, I tried to think of a way to switch out my bits and pieces, pictures, and textures.  Voila -- VELCRO, along with stickpins, and hanging things from the binder rings!!!!  Though I am stamping, using rubons, painting samples on, and inking some of the pages -- pictures of collections, color palettes, bits of lace and such are attached to pages with small pieces of velcro and pins, and tied to the binder rings, making them movable and removable!

Inner Cover inked with Walnut TH Distress Ink, handmade embellie using Ranger slide mount products, 7 Gypsies Journal Pages, 7 Gypsies gear rubon over gears printed on page, black gems in centers, small piece of Prima black Say It In Crystals swirl, page inked in Victorian Velvet TH Distress Ink

Boing!! I had a V-8 moment and realized that these really big binder rings were great for displaying items inside the book and they can be switched out!  In addition, the size of the rings allows the book to be as thick and lumpy as I want and still close flat.

7 Gypsies Journal Pages with a few of my favorite things -- Love Bird sizzix die cut from striped TH Grungeboard and inked with Broken China and Stormy Sky TH Distress Ink, my FAVORITE stamp in the world, the frilly dress, and a piece of my grandmother's vintage lace with a stickpin I made.

The love bird -- which begs for more embellishment when the impulse strikes -- is attached with velcro and the piece of vintage lace is attached with a stickpin.  There is a piece of velcro on the reverse page hiding the pin and presenting another opportunity to display items, in this case a heart cut from a vintage marbelized cardboard box (seen below).

The fantastic dress form printed on the jounal page is inspiration in itself, but it seemed like the perfect place to attach a small picture of the Prima Donna Downey fabric dress forms that just arrived at Flamingo Scraps.

Da Vinci's exquisite anatomical and mechanical drawings have become my new fave Steampunk images -- I have several more to add.  And this fabulous 7 Gypsies Journal Page with the grid just begged to be home to color and medium samples!

I am really excited about my Inspiration Book!  The gorgeous 7 Gypsies products made it easy to get inspired and now I have one place to go to give my mojo a jump start -- instead of getting frustrated digging through the piles of paper and memorabilia I sadly tend to accumulate.  This book not only has additional pages for goodies, the removable items will allow it to always be a work in progress.  And isn't that what our inspiration should be? -- always changing, evolving, growing, always a work in progress.

Susan's Favorite Tips & Tricks for Scrapbooking

I'm certainly no expert, but I thought I might share a few things I've learned since I started scrapping in 2004.  I hope you will share back with me and the other readers too!  Here we go......

1. Not sure if a stamp is the perfect design for a certain spot? Stamp it first with a solvent ink like "StazOn" on a piece of plastic and lay over your project in progress to check. Clear inserts or packaging that come with products are handy for this.

2.  Older stickers and diecuts that you probably won’t use again make great masks. To use the diecuts,  lightly apply a re-positionable adhesive to the back. Then ink, paint or spray over them.  Use baby powder on the sticker adhesive to make it non-sticky and re-positionable.

3.  Place embellishments in odd numbers like three and five for more visual impact.

4.  Push pins are a staple in my toolbox.  I use them to pierce a pin hole in paper to set a brad or if I need to do a little hand stitching.  I also use them to unclog glue bottles.  I store them by sticking them in an old piece of packaging that some brads came in.

5.  Keep a scrapbooking notebook.  I buy those 99 cent composition books and then cover and embellish them...

This is a composition book my niece covered and embellished using Prima's Rebellious Papers and Rub-Ons

Mine is with me most of the time.  I can jot down ideas and inspirations.  Or maybe I just need to remember a cool website or the name of a new paper company.  I also use mine to draw layout sketches.  Of course, my notebook ends up holding my Flamingo Scraps to do lists too!

6.  Always date your layouts - even if it's only on the back.  Years and years from now, your descendants will be glad you provided a timeline for family events.  At Amanda's urging, Flamingo Scraps now carries 7 Gypsies mini labels.  These are perfect for writing dates on.

7.  Don't reinvent the wheel!  Use easily available resources like Two Peas In A Bucket-Pea Soup.  It's an awesome compilation of titles, quotes, poems and sayings for a variety of subjects.  Just use the search function.  Or how about using this Bazzill card stock matching service?  Use the arrows to find your patterned paper's manufacturer, then the paper collection and voila! - the coordinating Bazzill cardstock colors are already matched for you!

8.  Do you have a drawer full of partially used embellishments?  Perhaps you bought something specifically to go with a themed layout and now you're stuck with the leftovers?  Take a look at the remaining items with an objective eye.  Maybe some Glimmer Mist or Stickles will change it enough that you can use it for something unrelated.  Glimmer Glam and Glimmer Glaze cover quite well as does dipping something in melted UTEE.  Step outside your box and experiment - what do you have to lose?  Just some old embellishments that were just taking up room.

9.  Inking makes everything better!  Inking your paper edges, especially those you are layering, gives the illusion of depth.  Patterned papers tend to get "lost" in each other without inked edges to show where one paper ends and another begins.  Did you crop that photo?  No one wants to see those stark white raw edges - ink your cropped photos!  It's important to know what kind of ink to use too.  Here is a Scrapjazz article that explains the differences in inks.

10. Challenge yourself to learn something new.  The internet is a wealth of information in the forms of blogs, videos and social networking.  Find several blogs that are good for tutorials and techniques and follow them.  Blogging has been a real revelation for me - would you believe that four months ago I had never written a blog?  I didn't even have the password to our blog!  Now, I'm a bloggin' fool!

I hope you have found something useful in today's post!  Won't you leave a comment with one of your favorite scrapbooking tips or tricks?

My First Adventures in Steampunk!!!!

Once upon a time, I had a career in Historic Preservation.  I was an architectural historian and historian, and while I worked on almost every conceivable type of building, landscape, district, and structure -- I found myself drawn to industrial buildings and structures like textile mills and bridges.  Maybe that is why I am so fascinated by the Steampunk trend in scrapping.  It reminds me of a time when huge, noisy, smoking machines were housed in vast buildings with lavish architectural details and when bridges were works of art and not just a way to get across water.

Steampunk to me is the iron fist in the velvet glove, a steel magnolia, it is, well it is the movie The Wild, Wild West with Kenneth Branagh wearing a brocade waistcoat while manuevering his outlandish mechanical inventions.  It is chainlink and pearls, gears with jewels, it is wings on things that were never meant to fly.  Steampunk is hard and soft, vintage and futuristic.  I may never really master Steampunk as a scrapping style, but I am sure going to have fun trying!

This is my first foray into Steampunk as I braved the Steampunk Challenge on Scrapbook.com in July -- Prima paintable, lots of Tim Holtz distress ink, transparency of an industrial scene, metal elements from Flamingo Scraps Steampunk/Vintage grab bag, distressed, embellished, and inked picture is of my great grandmother

And this is my second for the same challenge this month -- Webster's Pages Seaside Retreat, dimensional seahorse stickers with Tim Holtz grunge board wings and gears, elements highlighted with Crackle Glossy Accents, image of woman and seahorse from internet images is printed on canvas, covered with Antique Linen distress stickles, and embellished.

Since then I have been experimenting with different materials and textures to create Steampunk embellishments of my own!

My experiments in Steampunk Embellishments!

Ranger metal slide mount frame with glass plates and keepsake pocket insert -- vintage image of gears with tiny gears in the pocket and a gear on a jump ring and torn strip of silk for finishing touches

Similar embellie with shell image, tiny shells in pocket, and shell on curled wire and vintage lace

Vintage watch  crystals with tiny watch pieces embedded in them using clear and sepia Glossy Accents -- Crackle Glossy Accents creates a fabulous effect as well!

Whether you go all out with Steampunk, or just incorporate some details into your layouts and paper crafting,  it is an exciting and fun style to play with.  It will really stretch your imagination and creativity and add fabulous texture and dimension to any project!!  And just look around you -- the Steampunk influence is showing up everywhere -- fashion, home decor, and my personal favorite, the new Blue Plate Mayonnaise commercials!!!

The Gypsies are Coming!

7 Gypsies that is!

Flamingo Scraps is excited to now be carrying 7 Gypsies products.  We expect delivery today so look for some new products to be available now in the store!  We have carefully chosen items you can use in your vintage and Steampunk projects.

Hardware - Time Flies

Ephemera - Gypsy Mini

Also expected before the end of August are American Crafts and Prima Marketing.  This is the first time Flamingo Scraps will be carrying American Crafts and we can't wait to get our hands on this Dear Lizzy Enchanted collection!

Noble Hare

Mystical Mary

And of course, who can top Prima Marketing for amazing flowers and other embellishments?  They do not disappoint with their Summer CHA release.

These sweet and feminine flowers are perfectly coordinated with Dear Lizzy Enchanted collection.  They come in pink and blue also.

Bronte Blooms

How about layering these beauties to make a shabby chic bloom?

Sweet Taffy

Look at these elegant flowers!  Feathers!  Won't these look great with Webster's Pages new Hollywood Vogue collection?

Guava Peony - Etude

More feathers!  We have carefully chosen colors and styles to coordinate with the various new paper collections we are carrying.

Gwendolyn's Bluebird

And here is Prima's new incarnation of their wildly popular Say It In Pearls line........Lace!  Yes, this luscious swirl is made of pearls and lace.  Perfect for the trend toward vintage we are seeing this fall.

Say It In Pearls and Lace

I hope I have whet your appetite for the scrappy, good things coming soon to Flamingo Scraps!  Stay tuned for more coming attractions - Webster's Pages and Pink Paislee begin shipping September 1st!