Hello, Maja Fans, welcome to Maja Design blog today, and Maja’s place as well 🙂

I hope you enjoy visiting our creative spaces and like to sit in our sofa 🙂 So far you have seen Jenny’s gorgeous room and Elena’s bright and cozy place – today I’d like you to invite to my small scrapheaven 🙂

My room is so tiny it’s quite difficult to take photos inside – it has only about 2 x 3 m – but I’m still so happy I can have it for my own! It used to be my kids’ playing room, but after the grand overhaul of our flat I got the chance to take it 🙂 To save as much space as possible, we don’t have doors in most of the rooms, and so I have to struggle to keep my space rather clean-ish, in case somebody drops in to visit 😉 Here’s the view you get at the doorstep:

When you enter (which is about half a step forward LOL), you see a wall full of furniture to your left – there’s really not enough room to swing a cat 😉 Now I know what it looks like – plenty of stuff! But I like to store my embellies by colour, stamps by theme or category, papers by manufacturers, etc. – and that requires a lot of space and means plenty of boxes 🙂 Here, for example, I store my stamps, stickers and some of the dies, and the boxes hold flowers:

Here’s the cabinet with paper embellishments, chipboards, Prima flower tubes and bling and ribbons in the small boxes:

Here’s my tool and paper corner…well. I’m a paper freak and just can’t turn a blind eye to a beautiful pattern!

And if you add to that the fact I design for several shops and manufacturers, who send you that many papers:

…then no wonder I need so many shelves and boxes 🙂

Now turn around and you have the working space. The drawers contain more embellies of every kind, but remember, I love detailed segregation, so there’s still a lot of space for more stuff 😉

Above the desk, on the shelves, you will find my buttons, Stickles glitter box, small stamps sets in the black file binders and on the top shelf – my season houses I’ve shared recently and handmade gifts from my scrapfriends from around the world 🙂

Then you have metal and cardboard containers with various small embellies – for example, the reindeer boxes contain Christmas stuff 🙂 And can you see those two vintage cars? They are…candy boxes, now filled with flair buttons and album metal corners 🙂

The right half of the desk with drawers beneath is my media centre 😉 I keep my inks, mists, paints, mixed media and embossing powders here. Here’s also the place for all “dirty” work, hence the craft sheets. The mini drawers are where I keep brads (again, by colour and kind, like crystal or pearls 😉 )

Finally, under the desk I keep scraps of papers – is it only me or is it normal not to throw away a bit of paper until it’s possible to punch a tiny circle out of it? 😀

And so, here’s where I create and spend most of my time (as it’s also my business office 😉 ), often with my kids:

Thank you for getting here with me 🙂

I hope you enjoyed the visit – drop by any time!

 

 

Good morning, Maja Friends.

Today is my turn to invite you to my little scrap space

  It was not easy for me to make the shots of my place after I have seen Jenny’s gorgeous room about a month ago. But anyway, though it is not even a sole room , I hope you will like to see the place where I create.

So I have 3 places where I create – my kitchen, my daughter’s room and our living room, espeacially the big windows that I use to make the shots of all of my projects.

More often you can find me here, at my daughter’s room, where we share one desk:

  You have noticed I have almost occupied her desk with my Shimmerz paints and mists, but  in turn, I allow her to use them too. She doesn’t mind.

The only issue that arrives almost all the time – who is responsible for cleaning the desk, as I may start to create, then she comes , finds a small place and starting to borrow almost all of my embellishments I have prepared for my project.

After I find time to get back to my project I can not find anything, but on the other day she comes to me and says: Look, Mom, what I have created for you.

So what else I need to say that just – oh, dear, this is adorable, but could you be so kind and don’t pick it next time without my permission first.

So it’s not easy to share something with someone , especially when DT boxes arrive, she looks in them and says – it is too much for you, I need 30% of it or I won’t let you create at my desk.

This is for instance how she says about my Chipboard box:

So doing it this way, I have struggled with her for providing me with one shelf, and she allowed me to use a half of it, so this is where I keep all my stencils, masks and some mediums:

  As I can not keep all my supplies in open access because we have another one little kid, my son, who is just 20 months old and who  explores life every minute, I need to hide the rest of my stuff.

So this is how I keep all my papers, if I don’t want them to be painted or leaving some sketches on them:

  The number 516 doesn’t mean I have 516 sheets of cardstock, it’s just a note that was made during the shipping the box to me by the customs office or someone like that.

As I design for several companies I decided to keep all the collections ( the papers and the embellishments in one box), it makes it easier to find and match them. For Maja Design papers I use their signed boxes and just make the notes which collections are in the box.

I am not going to show you my kitchen desk, as you won’t see something special there.

So our next stop is another room full of light and white furniture:

  This drawer is a shabby style one, an we bought  the same leather sofa, so next step is to paint the walls with white paint and add some decorations.

Don’t laugh at the number of the baby carriages, I bought them for my decoration projects, but I need to hide them as well as the kids are struggling for them to play with.

This is how many of my Layouts are kept, mostly the old ones, that I don’t like too much and I think I just need to put off the embellishments and give the papers to the kids. I need to think how to recycle them if I don’t want them to be on the albums or on the walls

  Yes, the paint is hidden even there.

And here is my favorite object in this room

  I am scrap addicted but I am book- addicted too. It is full of the books for the kids or teenagers mostly, but I buy those books that are out of age, and that are inetersted for everyone. I need to say that  for the past 5 years I have spent on the books almost the same som of money as for my scrap hobby. I seek for good and inspiring illustrations, good poetry and the text that makes you start thinking while reading. No needless to say that I find a huge inspiration from the books too.

My hubby doesn’t like the idea of spending too much on my hobby as well as on the books as his main argument is – we don’t have ebough space to keep it all. But I have already found many drawers and extra space everywhere, and I can not wait when our house will be built so I can have a huge studio and cabinet in one, half of it will be for creatong, the other one – for enjoying the books.

I hope you have liked my space as much as I love my house.

Next time Maja will invite us to her space, so stay tuned and don’t miss it on April 12th.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We always invite people in to our cozy world at Maja. We want you all to feel welcome and smell the coffee when you cross our threshold. But. You’ve never really visited us in our office or our respective scrap spaces. We decided to change that. In this little series you’ll be invited to our respective CT members scrap havens and who knows… there might be a personal guiding through the Maja office and warehouse in store…

The first one out to show you around her scrapspace is… Jenny.

When we first bought our house it was a complete mess. No heating, no electricity, no laundry room, etc, etc. And. No scrapbooking room either. I had been jammed up in a corner in our apartment and I really wanted a place for my stuff when we got a house. Not likely. It was so small it wouldn’t fit. The first year I litterally had to work on the floor using a carpenter’s rule and an isolation knife to create some cards. After that I was (again) jammed up in a corner with tons of building supplies. I think I got about four nails in my feet during that time.

I had saved up for years for my dream. Due to regulations and other difficulties it turned out to be a lot cheaper to build a separate house then add an extra room to the current one. So I started drawing. And planning. And drawing. And planning. Again and again and again. All to get the best possible solution and save as much money as possible. I drew the house and built it myself together with a carpenter who did some of the construction work.

It was very important to me that my scraphouse would be welcoming and cozy even if you didn’t scrap. I didn’t want it to look overwhelming and crowded with supplies, still I wanted to be able to have it visible and reachable. Tough combination.

I chose it to be in the same style as our main building so you can feel they belong together. I’ve used the same wooden floors, base colour and ceiling.

So take of your coat, borrow one of my dressing gowns and step inside…The bureau is an old cherry beureau that we used to have in our apartment. It didn’t fit in the new house so I bought some paint and new knobs for it. The dressing gowns are a must for any scrapper. At least in my opinion. 

I have divided my house into different areas… One messy area with paints, one sewing area, one clean area, one computer area and one area where I can stand up working. The last one is my area with kitchen cabinets…Besides from being a good height it holds tons of supplies.

My desktop carousel is filled up with a lot of “must have” supplies. Tools, Pearl Makers, rulers, knives etc. The cute bucket is one of four that I have in the house. They are a complement to my two large trash cans. Everybody’s lazy by nature. It’s so much easier to through away stuff in something small that’s close to where you work then use the large trash can. I empty the small ones in the big ones when they are full.

I mainly use the electricity to iron ribbon on my mini ironing board and for my Distrezz It All. But I’m considering putting in my coffee machine as well. Hydrangeas are my favourite flowers and I have tons of them. The beautiful wedding frame emptied my travelling funds when I went to Dubai a couple of years ago. I just had to have it. I keep dual tip pens in the corner…So here’s the true Kottens’s Corner. The best armchair I’ve ever come across. I actually fit. I can crawl up like a little girl with my long filly legs. That says something. Everybody who tries it wants to buy it, but oh no. It stays right there. I love to alter ATC trays and configuration boxes… Here are a couple of them. I keep different pens in the white cutlery holder that was a Christmas present from Marie two years ago.I want people to feel at home in my house. So here’s my little Fika corner. Cookies, biscuits and I also have lemonade. The candle holder used to belong to my grandmother and my other grandmother crocheted the table cloth.

The IKEA Expedit shelf was another leftover that I saved from the dump. The beautiful basket on the floor holds books, my beloved teal socks and a million phone chargers or so.

The luggage trunks are Joel’s treasure-chests. I keep toys, blankets and other stuff in them for him to use when he visits me in my little house.

The beautiful wallpaper is a reprint of a wallpaper that was really popular when our house was built in 1910.A little close up…In the middle of the room I have placed our old kitchen table that didn’t fit our tiny kitchen. It was collecting dust in an old barn so I rebuilt it to include shelves on one side and chairs on the other. People think that I’m nuts, but I actually saw a bunch of cute baskets on my way home from work in the display window of Åhléns. So I bought them and rebuilt the table to fit the baskets. I painted it white and put some IKEA Helmer drawers under the leaf and my clean area was all done! It fits three or more if you remove the Helmer drawers.I usually sit on the side where the baskets are when friends are coming over. It gives me access to both the messy area and the clean one without having to move around.Ok, so let’s take a look at the next wall. The long desk contains the messy are, sewing area and my working area. I love to decorate my windows… This area is also great as an extra worktable. It’s just to remove the Helmer drawers. And now to my favourite area. The messy one. To the left-my Distress Ink Pad storage. Holds all 48 pads. I have recently re-organized the picture rails again since I can’t fit everything…And here’s my sewing area. I used to sew a lot of curtains and baby clothes by order, but there’s simply not time for everything…Buttons and other handy stuff…Here’s where I work… usually a lot. 🙂

I hope you have found some inspiration from my little corner of the world.

Next time we’ll be visiting Elena, so don’t miss out on her space March 15th.