Hi all! Gabrielle here with you today to share a layout I made of my little great-niece Kiera.  I love this sweet pic of her that her mother took, I wanted to keep the page light and feminine so I thought I would go with a grey and pink color scheme.   I decided to work with the soft brown/grays in the NEW ‘A Gift For You’ collection, and thought it would be fun to use pink as my accent color, using some papers from some of the other Maja Design collections.

While this collection is meant as a holiday collection, I thought it would be fun to show how you can use this paper collection for non-holiday themed projects as well.  One thing I really love about Maja Design papers is that, while the front of the patterned paper gives itself more to the theme of the collection, the backside allows you to use the paper for any theme because the backside tends to have a more generic design to it.

I began my page design by layering grey toned papers from the ‘A Gift for You’ collection, with pinks from other collections (Vintage Spring Basics, Coffee In the Arbour).  I also took one of the scripted pattern designs from ‘A Gift For You’ collection (Hope to See You Soon paper) and used this paper to punch floral petals using an EK Success punch (Retro Flower, medium and Large punch).  I used both sides of this patterned paper, lightly inked parts of the petals, leaving some parts natural.  Then I lightly misted the petals with water and gave them a crinkle.  I added some floral stamens to the centers to finish the look.  The chipboard corset chipboard piece is from Dusty Attic Designs called Lacing Tash.

I used ‘My Dear Friend-bs’ paper as one of the layers on my project and then used the left over scraps to cut out some heart shapes which I matted with the darker gray paper called ‘Wrapped in Old Newspaper’.  I added machine stitching and then used some Platinum Stickles over the stitches to give the thread a glittery look.  The chipboard title and zipper accents are from Dusty Attic.  To give the page that light-hearted girly look, I cut some butterflies from the ‘Butterflies are Free’ paper from ‘Coffee in the Arbour’ collection.

I added more floral designs in the top right corner using the same method I mentioned earlier.  I clustered these over a Dusty Attic Corner Flourish #1 which I painted with white Gesso, stamped with some script stamps, edged with some brown chalk ink (Ingvild Bolme’s Branch Bark) and coated with Crackle Varnish.

Maja Design Papers used in this Project:

~ A Gift For You (Handwritten Postcards-bs, My Dear Friend-bs, Hope to See You Soon, Hope to See You Soon-bs, Wrapped In Old Newspaper-bs)

~ Vintage Spring Basics (7th of May)

~ Coffee In the Arbour (Buttterflies Are Free, Raspberry Jam Cookies-bs)

~ Vintage Autumn Basics (XVI)

I hope you enjoyed my project today, and hope that I’ve inspired you to use your Maja papers on a variety of different themed projects.