Meet Our New Designer Karin Åkesdotter

Hi everyone, my name is Karin Åkesdotter and I’m from Gothenburg, Sweden where I live with my husband and our seven-year-old son Ted. I teach textile crafts and language in a high school to 13-16-year-olds. I absolutely love my job and my students, but it doesn’t leave me with as much crafting time as I’d like. In the rare moments when I’m not teaching or crafting, you’ll find me reading or orienteering. I also like to play badminton and floorball, which you may know as unihockey – it’s very popular here in Sweden! A special interest of mine is wine, and I was very lucky to study Oenology at university alongside Arts and Crafts with a focus on Textiles. I daydream about moving to Tuscany one day and starting a little winery there with my husband – he would be the winemaker, and I could run tastings and hold watercolour classes!

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in arts and crafting and as well as papercrafting, I enjoy sewing, drawing and watercolour painting. Check out my paintings here.

I really got into cardmaking when I was pregnant with Ted and discovered that there were challenges online. Having the opportunity to craft and share what I’d created with others was so inspiring, and it made me want to make a special effort to produce beautiful cards and always try to come up with something new. I was soon invited to design for some great online shops and fantastic stamp companies including My Favourite Things, Paper Smooches, Lawn Fawn, Purple Onion, Mama Elephant and Waltzing Mouse Stamps.

I’ve had a lot of fun papercrafting over the years; it’s such a humble craft and there’s a really close-knit community online that I’m proud to be part of. I love sharing my work on my blog and Instagram and getting feedback from like-minded crafters!

My style could be described as cute, clean and simple, and I love adding a splash of colour with both Copic markers and watercolour paints. I also enjoy die cutting, which is a great technique for adding an interesting twist to cards. I’m looking forward to sharing my techniques with you in PaperCrafter and hope you find it as inspiring as I do!

I wanted to share this card with you as I used so many of my favourite techniques to make it. I created it as a tutorial for My Favorite Things, and I was so happy with the result of combining cardmaking and watercolouring in one project. I adore both dry and heat embossing as they both create style and dimension, and an embossed card always looks like it’s been given some extra effort and love. Embossing works great with watercolouring too as it helps to add definition and makes working in small, detailed areas much easier.

I can’t wait to share more of my designs with you all. My parting wisdom is to mind the millimetres – they really do matter, and to not hesitate to redo something if you aren’t completely happy with the way it looks!

Lots of love,
Karin x

Check out Karin’s adorable PaperCrafter debut in issue 103, on sale 16th December and let us know what you think via Facebook and Twitter.