Life in the Country : MajaDesign

Winner of the May Mood Board

31 May, 2014 - Crea Diem, Life in the Country, Mood boards, Sofiero, Vintage Autumn Basics, Vintage Spring Basics, Vintage Summer Basics

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Our May Mood Board was a Mood Board about love… Here’s a reminder of what it looked like.
And here are our contributions for this month…

This month must be a new record when it comes to creative and beautiful art. We’ve had such a hard time picking a winner. But here it goes. Lindy_Gillespie Lindy Gillespie from Australia! The collection of your choice will be sent to your doorstep.

Our next Mood Board will be presented on June 20th. Next Saturday we will announce the happy winners of our Coffee In The Arbour giveaway. I hope you haven’t missed it.

Until next time… Jenny

Life’s Simple Pleasures

Posted by Gabrielle Pollacco

21 May, 2014 - Collections, Layouts, Life in the Country, Maja Design information, Sofiero, Vintage Autumn Basics, Vintage Spring Basics, Vintage Summer Basics

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Hi everyone, Gabrielle here with you today to share a layout I made using lots of handmade blooms I made from Maja Design papers. Today I wanted to celebrate the everyday simple pleasures, like a little bouquet of beautiful smelling flowers/like a few snippits of Lavender. I echoed the title in my photo by using my photo editing software to add some words like ‘simple pleasures’ and ‘sweet Lavender’ to my photo with some script text. I used the Spellbinders ‘Rose Creations’ dies to make my blooms and pulled together a bunch of papers from the maja collections in greens and plummy/pinks.

I chose papers that did not have a lot of patterns on them to keep an even hue to the floral designs. To make the blooms I lightly moistened the die cut petals with some water and just curled the edges of the petals out to make my rosettes.

Another design feature I added to my page is thes layered stitched circles. I chose 3 patterned papers that I thought looked pretty together and then cut out 3 different sized circles. I inkedthe edges with some soft brown chalk ink and machine stitched to finish. I also added some texture to the background paper using the Rings & Puddles Memory Box stencil with texture paste.

Here you can see the combined cut circle and floral embellishments working together. I added some Ingvild Bolme resin butterflies to build up the shabby-chic look of the page as well as some Tresors de Luxe lace. I also added some small ‘bud’ clusters in that I plucked off some old silk flowers I was tossing out, they were the exact color match to my handmade blooms.

Maja Design Papers used for this project: Vintage Autumn Basics (X-bs, Heritage-bs), Sofiero (Princess Margareta’s Garden-bs), Vintage Summer Basics (1920, 1923, 1933) Vintage Spring Basics (7th of May-bs, 10th of March-bs), Life in the Country (Summer Fields-bs, Sowing Seeds-bs).

I hope you enjoyed my project today and hope I inspired you to try scrapping everyday little things that bring you joy!

Boys’ Life By The Sea

Posted by Maja Nowak

20 May, 2014 - Altered Items, Cards, Life by the Sea, Life in the Country

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A very good morning to you, Maja Fans! Welcome to Maja Design blog today, it’s Maja here to share some boy-themed inspiration.

Even though our family lives near the moutnains in the south of Poland, we all love the sea and sailing. After a few years with Winnie the Pooh 😉 and our first true sailing trip, my boys started to dream about a marine-themed room. And so last year, when they went away for a week of their summer school, I did a major renovation and changed the room completely, repainted it and added a lot of marine elements and decor items. I wish you could have seen their faces when they returned and went into their room! 😀 And then, a couple of days ago (yeah, that’s typical for me) I spotted something – there was still a Winnie the Pooh nameplate on the door!! I immediately took out one of my most favourite Maja collections, Life by the Sea, and created this nameplate:

I took an ornate wooden plate and decorated with lighthouse paper. I put my boys’ school ID cards mini photos into resin frames and placed them in the centre.

And then I started to fill in the composition, adding Prima flowers and chipboard letters, real starfish and seashells and images I cut out of various papers:

I made mini banners to decorate the names and added some metal charms:

Adding liquid pearls and Distress Crackle Paint here and there was the finishing touch:

As usually with my projects, the nameplate is rather dimensional 🙂

And here’s its destination place 🙂

Supplies:

Maja Design papers: Life by the Sea: Navigate, Drop the Anchor, Marina, A Day at Sea, the East Coast, the East Coast bs; Life in the Country: Strawberries with Ice.

Other: flowers, chipboard letters – Prima; Distress Crackle Paint (Picket Fence) – Ranger; seashells, metal charms, cheesecloth – from my stash.

But I think Life by the Sea collection is perfect for all boy creations, not only the marine-themed ones. And so I created this birthday card for a young gentleman 🙂

I like adding putting themed charms and elements into my cards to add more interest, and so here I added a mini car:

…and cute buttons – don’t you just love the plaid? 🙂

I stamped the bear image onto patterned paper and coloured it with Promarkers:

I die-cut the birthday number twice and glued the digits together, creating a little shadow effect:

Supplies:

Maja Design papers: Life by the Sea – Life Jacket, Morning Swim bs, the East Coast, Nautic bs, the West Coast.

Other: stamp – Stamperia; dies – Sizzix, Promarkers – Letraset; metal charm, buttons, ribbon, twine – from my stash.

That’s all for today from me, have a wonderful day and visit us tomorrow for more inspriation!

A Collection of Thanks

Posted by Andrea Ewen

24 April, 2014 - Cards, Life in the Country, Ska Vi Ta En Fika?, Vintage Autumn Basics

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Happy Thursday Maja friends! It’s Andrea here with you today…sharing some creativity and inspiration, I hope! I had gone away a few weeks ago to a ‘scrapbooking weekend’ getaway with some gal friends…and since I could only bring what I could carry (hard to pack up an entire craft room) I had to get creative with the limited supplies I had. Luckily, Maja Design papers do all the talking, with minimal accoutrements required:This card features the Ska vi ta en fika collection of papers. I adorned the horizontal panels with some paper piercing, vintage lace, paper flowers and buttons.

I guess that it’s no secret that I love liquid pearls. This card is from the Vintage Autumn Basics collection and is absolutely doused with those lovely liquid delights. I love the freedom I have with them…I can put them just about anywhere. Another benefit of the liquid pearls is the size of the application. Around the outside border, I made very tiny dots. On the inside panels, I made larger ones, just by changing the amount of pressure applied to the bottle. I added some lace, ruffled ribbon, a line of paper flowers and some corner punches on the sentiment panel to finish off the card.

Lastly, I made this hidden sentiment card with the Life in the Country series. I picked up a cute embossing panel which is just 2″ X 6″…perfect for making the white horizontal panel. I added some paper flowers, blue stamens and punched leaves. I also added some Zva Creative crystal flourishes in addition to liquid pearls. Here’s a peek of the inside:

Thanks so much for spending part of your day with me, I hope you were inspired!

Going Soft and Smokey with Maja Papers!

Posted by Gabrielle Pollacco

26 February, 2014 - Collections, Layouts, Life in the Country, Ska Vi Ta En Fika?, Vintage Autumn Basics, Vintage Summer Basics

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I don’t know how winter has been for you lovely ladies in Sweden, but here in Canada it has been extremely cold and snowy this year! I for one am soooo ready for Spring to make an appearance! So to warm myself up a little I thought I’d work on a summery photo. This is a photo I took a few years back of my oldest daughter when we were taking a summer vacation near Sable Falls in (Northern) Ontario.

I’ve recently been putting together a color inspiration board for myself on Pinterest and I find one of my favourite color combinations is purples with greens, but I’m particularly fond of the these colors in soft smokey tones. So for this page I reached for some of the soft smokey plums in the ‘Ska vi ta en Fika’ collection and mixed it with some taupey grey and soft green from the Vintage Summer basics colleciton.

I wanted to add some ‘lush’ greenery to the page so I matted behind the photo with some green paper from the Life In the Country paper collection (Sowing Seeds-bs), and added a new vine chipboard design from Dusty Attic called ‘Ivy Corners’ adding a few Dusty Attic purple roses in as well.

I just love to add vintage style embellishments to my Maja Design layouts because the beautiful papers lend themselves so well to these types of embellishments, like vintage lace (from Tresors de Luxe), Natural floral accents (also from Tresors de luxe), chipboard designs (Skelleton clock and flourishes, from Dusty Attic Designs) and the Flowers are from a tin of blooms from Recollections.

Clocks are one of those design elements that I feel work with almost any page. So again on this page I’ve added in some of my favourite clock designs from the Vintage Autumn Basics collection (XVI).

When I get my Maja Design collections, I love to fan out the papers and enjoy how the different patterns and designs look against each other. I always want to share these pretty designs in a unique and fun way, ….here I was able to do this using a new chipboard by Dusty Attic called ‘Geometric’ border. I glued a small sampling of a few of the patterned papers behind the small square designs.

Maja Design Papers used in this project: Ska vi ta en Fika (Söders höjder – bs, En Kopp te-bs, Chaite-bs, Favoriter-bs), Life In the Country (Sowing Seeds), Vintage Summer Basics (1932-bs), Vintage Autumn Basics (XVI).

I hope you enjoyed my little project today using Maja Design products and hope that it brought you a little Spring warmth as well! xo