Making Paper Ruffles with Maja Designs!!

I'm so very excited to share with you a project today that I made with one of my favourite Maja collections "Vintage Summer Basics". I'm just crazy about the softly distressed designs and muted tones in this collection, and the sweet mini-florals put me in mind of a little girls ruffle dress! So I thought I would play with paper ruffles to decorate this layout that I made of my little great-niece Kiera.

To make the ruffles I chose 3 of the Vintage Summer patterned papers in shades starting from light to medium to dark and cut 2 x 12" strips of each (the strips were about 1.25" thick). I then glued together each of the pairs of strips to make 3 x 24" strips.
  TIP: I like to tear the two edges that I'm gluing together rather than attaching two cut edges, it helps give a more seamless look.

I then took each of the strips and lightly spritzed them with water and then began taking one edge and gathering them with my fingers. Be careful not to gather too deeply into the ruffle, you want the other edge to have a nice curvey edge. I then let the gathered paper dry thoroughly. Then I took some good strong two-sided sticky tape, opened out my ruffle again so it's flat and ran the sticky tape along the backside of the pleated edge. Now bring the ruffle back together, the tape will hold the ruffle together and will also create the adhesive to attach your ruffle to the page. Layer your ruffles from light to dark for a pretty effect. Here are a few close-up pic's of my page...

Supplies:

Patterned Paper: Maja, Vintage Summer Basics (1908-bs, 1911, 1920, 1922-bs), Chipboard: Dusty Attic Designs (NEW deVine Frame Set, and NEW Flutterbies #3), Flowers: Jolee Boutique, Prima, Dusty Attic and Recollections (nest/eggs). Other: lace trim, kitchen twine, pearl strand all off the roll from local fabric store, adhesive: Tombo 2 sided sticky tape strip.

A few people have asked me what that tattered sting stuff is that I use around my floral clusters.  It's a roll of yarn I bought at our Michaels craft shop, from the yarn area. I've posted a picture below so that you can see what it looks like.  A roll of this stuff goes a long long way and with a 40% off coupon, I think the whole roll cost me only like $3.00

 

I hope you give paper ruffles a try! The Maja papers are of such a high quality, thick and strong so they can take plenty of paper manipulating. The ruffle technique works beautifully on cards as well!