I’m a papercrafter based in York, UK. I love working with paper flowers and original vintage book pages to create beautiful new designs and prints.
My name is Maria and I live in the beautiful city of York in England with my husband and gorgeous little girl.
I have always loved crafting things. When I was young I used to work my way through papercraft books, attempting to make everything I could from them. Origami was my favourite with jumping frogs and water bombs as my speciality and I still remember how to make them... (I may have learnt to make the waterbombs to throw at my sisters!)
My other love is books. I collect books I love and since there are so many of those, my house is full to bursting with them! My husband and I even had a book themed wedding and I wanted to make all the decorations for the wedding myself out of vintage book pages, re-purposing old, broken, dusty, unloved books.
Before our wedding I was struggling to find the right coloured vintage books for the table centre pieces for the wedding. So, on a whim, I bid on and won a joblot of books from eBay. Suddenly I was the owner of over 1100 amazing hardback cloth bound books...in my living room...which is not big...oh dear...but it’s okay, I had a plan! Fortunately I found just the right coloured books for the wedding table centre pieces amongst these books, but in the joblot of books there were some damaged ones. I hate the idea of destroying a beautiful book so I used these damaged ones for all the wedding decorations, giving them a second lease of life. I made all sorts from bookpage roses, flowers, printed letter and picture bunting, table place settings and paper heart garlands. I loved it! Making something from scratch was a lot of fun.
I had a lot of compliments about the decorations, especially the bookpage heart garlands and a few people asked me to make them a garland which I did happily. It made me realise that they were something other people liked and wanted themselves and that is how my shop evolved.
My vintage book page heart garlands continue to be my best seller. My original wedding garland is still hanging up in my living room. It’s a little treasure from a special day in my life and I love the idea that something I make will play a special part in someone else’s.
Over the past couple of years I have expanded my range of papercrafts, adding to the garland range where I began, to include printed classic book quotes, rolled paper flower art and even paper flower jewellery. I have lots more ideas for items in my shop and hope to continue to expand the range.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you love my crafts as much as I do.
