Maya Road Design Team

Art Journaling with Maya Road

For the last few months, I've been keeping an art journal that  I write into throughout the week. I create my background page in the beginning of the week and then add stamping, journaling, bits and pieces all week long. The two-page spread is complete at the end of each week. (You can find all my pages here.)

Here's the one I made last week before I put anything on it:

It uses all Maya Road products. The first thing I did was to lay down my butterflies:

Then I sprayed the page with Mulberry Red Mist and a little Butternut Squash Orange mist. Since my book has watercolor paper, I used a baby wipe to spread the mist all around so it looks like paint and not mist.  Then I added white paint to the edges so it gave definition and made the page a little less dark.

Then I used my butterflies to trace around ledger paper and cut three of them out and adhered to my page. I wrote "free to be me" across all three butterflies.

I then added three different trims to each edge: Satin Pleat Edging in Brown, Small Daisy Vintage Lace and Organza Roses in Pink.

On Day one, I just stamped the date and then added a few more stamps and a little watercolor. Here's how it looked after day one:

 The stamps I used are: Measure Twice, Just My Type, and Blue Ribbon Sentiments.

For the next two days, I just did more of the same. I added a small photo of my kids' hugging their dad that I took on Tuesday.  A few more stamps, some watercolors and the left page is finished.

The next day I wanted to use the typewriter but what I didn't realize was that the white paint I have on the bottom has something on it which makes the ink resist a bit so the image didn't come out the way I liked, so I cut out some hearts 

from music paper, colored them with watercolors and covered up the part I didn't like. Here's the end of Thursday:

For the next three days, I did more of the same (but avoided stamping on the bottom.) I added one more photo of my younger son watching the older one as he watercolors. Here's what the page looked like at the end of the week.

 

And here's the full spread:

Pretty simple but a nice way to have a quick look at my week and use some of my favorite Maya Road products. During weeks when I went out more, I've adhered movie stubs, shopping receipts, etc to these pages, too. It's a perfect way to combine a little art, some journaling, and some memory keeping into your day. Most of the time, that day's entry only took me 15 minutes but the end result is always wonderful and deeply satisfying.

Thank you for letting me share and I hope you give it a try, too!

Silver Tray Advent Calendar

We love advent calendars at our house.  We have one on a cookie sheet that the kids use every December to count down the days to Christmas.  Well, when I made this silver tray chalkboard last month, I thought…..gosh, I wonder if a magnet sticks to it.  Sure enough, it did.

And so, I started working on a new advent calendar for our family a while ago but then Dad went into the hospital and I put it aside until the other day.

I used lots of Maya Road chipboard snowflakes, buttons, stars, hearts ( from angel wing set), crowns, Bingo Markers, houses, scallop microchip pieces, birds and other misc. pieces.

I also used  Helmar 450 for my adhesive, silver pipe cleaners, mica flakes and Martha Stewart Microbeads and OA's Very Merry Line line.

I have made many advents over the years and the one thing that I have noticed is it is hard to get the magnet to stay stuck.

If you have ever worked with clay (maybe back in grade school) they taught you that a slick surface will not hold onto a slick surface for long.  This is true.  Every year when we get out the Halloween or Christmas advent calendar we end up having to re-glue a few magnets back on.  It’s not a big deal but my brain has been churning forever trying to come up with a solution.  Well, I think I did.

So, you take a bit of muslin or whatever left over thin fabric scraps you have laying around and make a little cover for the magnet.  This will give you a textured surface to glue down to a slick surface and then you have the fabric overlap which glues to the back of the chipboard, which holds the magnet on.  Does this make sense? Think of it as a permanent bra for your magnet.

This will also help to eliminate the magnet from scratching the painted chalkboard surface or if you are using black magnets, help to prevent scuffs.  The fabric is thin enough that there is no problem with the magnet working right through the fabric.

I’m actually quite proud of myself for thinking this up.  It took me about 4 years.  

I used some BG magnets - they are super strong and work awesome for advent calendars!

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you my Silver Tray Advent Calendar.

 

 

I hope you have a blessed Holiday.

Love,

Katie

 

Maya Mist Tutorial

So we often get questions about our Maya Mists and our favorite way to use them.  Let's start with the basics. We have lots of different Maya Mists in many many different colors - some are what we call base colors (no metallic in them) and some are metallic colors (which does have metallic).

The original intent of our mists has been for our chipboard. Chipboard is a lovely lovely thing. You can cover it with paint, patterned paper and more. But the easiest thing is our formulation of Maya Mists which gives a nice even opaque coverage to our chipboard. It can take grey chipboard and offer you an endless ream of possiblities.

I took out some of our new lovely Maya Mists (from our Early Winter Release) to show you how easy it is to mist.

Love our new skinny 1 oz bottles. Each bottle has a simple swatch on top of each bottle of what the color is:

Tutorial 1 - Misting Basics

So I started out with our Antique Silver Mist and some of our Ornate Tags Chipboard. You will see I am using a cardboard box to contain everything. This was an old Diet Coke box. If you want to save good misting boxes, layer some newsprint inside and as you spray take out the soaked layers and you will still have a lovely box to use later.

Now when you spray, swirl the mist  - do not do vigorous shaking. Vigorous shaking causes air bubbles to form in the bottle and then when you are misting it gets sucked up into your pump. When that happens, it causes your pump to sputter and your mist to come out all crazy spurts.

When you are misting hold your mist at a 45 degree angle and about 6 to 8 inches from your chipboard. This will give you the most even coverage. If you hold it too much closer to your chipboard you will tend to overspray as the mists will not have time to soak into your chipboard. If you hold it much further away, you will tend to not get even coverage and waste your mists (but that can be a neat technique too which we will save for another day)

Next spray 2-3 coats and your chipboard will look like this:

And to show you how quickly Maya Mist dries on our chipboard - check out this series of photos taken approximately 10 second apart of our Antique Patina Maya Mist:

And check out our 3 new Maya Mists in action (Antique Silver, Antique Bronze and Antique Patina)

Tutorial 2 - Mixing It Up

 We are now going to work with the base colors and see what mixing in some metallics will look like.

I started off with the Butternut Squash Orange Maya Mist:

Next after I allowed it to dry, I put a light coat of the Antique Silver Metallic Mist on the outside frame and it looks like this:

Again, you can layer different metallics onto our base color Mists for a totally different look (try also our Silver Plated or Iridescent on base colors for neat looks). Here is the what it can look like:

And here is what all the base colors look like from our new release as part of our chipboard banner minis. The scalloped parts are the base colors with quick spritz of Antique Silver over them. So pretty!
 

Tutorial 3 - Masking

Masking is another great technique you can use for our chipboard. Check out these snowflakes layered on top of our star coaster album. Now I wanted to use the Antique Patina Mist to give it a good color:

I sprayed the Antique Patina Mist and then lifted it off to reveal this:

I also saved the snowflakes so that I could use them on a project later:

And that is it! Hope you have enjoyed this tutorial using our Maya Mists. Will be back to show you some more techniques using it!

 Caroline

A sweet little birdie....

I created this album as a tribute to my grandmother. I don't have very many pictures of her, but I do have lots of memories. Only one page has a photo, and the rest contain some of my favorite remembrances.

To make the cover, I painted it and added a thick coat of Glossy Accents. When the glossy coating was dry, I used some Tim Holtz Crackle paint in a few areas--I put it on super thick so I could get nice, big crackles. To make the inside pages, I first covered the pages with some patterned paper. Then I whitewashed the paper with acrylic gesso and added swashes of crackle paint.

Maya Road Supplies:

 

• Bird Coaster Album
• Felt Pearl Blossoms
• Kraft Mini Tickets
• Scroll chipboard
• Organza Rose Trim
• Mini Oval Crochet Trim
• Trinket Buttons

 

Thanks for letting me share my album about my sweet grandmother! :) Love, Dina.

The Guys Canvas Album

Had great fun making this album. I played with mists and masks to create this album about all the guys in the family.I also used some of the Maya Road stamps to add to the background.

3 Ring Canvas Album

Gears Mini Chipboard

Fern Green Mist

Pink Mist

Dark Cornflower Blue Mist

The metal gears are Tim Holtz

Wooden Bingo Calendar Numbers

Bethany Mini Alphabet

Thanks

Sarah