Pion Design's Blog

We often get curious about our retailers, and every now and then we decide to let them tell us all a bit more about themselves. Today we want to highlight one of our online retailers – Live and Love Crafts.

Live & Love Crafts is a UK based online store, specializing in vintage & shabby chic craft materials. The store is situated in Reading, a small town southwest of London, and ships worldwide. Live & Love Crafts stocks most of Pion Design’s paper collections, as well as Pion’s vintage images. Apart from Pion Design’s products, other products that Live & Love crafts carries are a vast selection of charms and metal decorations, beautiful laces, ribbons and trims, flowers, ink, glitter and paints from Ranger.

The store is owned and operated by Sandra “Sandy” Mathis, a Swede who’s been living in England for more than 8 years. Sandra herself had been crafting and blogging for several years before she decided to open up her own crafts store. We asked Sandra to tell us about her love for paper crafting and her online store, and this is her story: Whenever I’d visit friends and family back home in Sweden, I’d always visit a craft store and purchase materials that I’d bring back with me, and use on my cards. Quite often I’d get asked by other crafters where one can buy those materials, in particular the papers. That’s how the idea to bring together the best of Scandinavian scrapbooking materials under one roof was born and in June 2012, Live & Love Crafts opened its virtual doors to the public.

I source most of my products from Scandinavia and I try to find products that are unique and rare.  The Scandinavian products are complemented with products from American vintage specialists such as Melissa Frances, Maya Road and Prima Marketing. My goal is to provide my customers with the best brands and highest quality vintage/shabby chic crafts products available in the market place. I also aim to make the shopping experience for my customers as easy and straight forward as possible by having a well-structured website that is easy to navigate and by providing excellent pictures of the products I am selling. One of my customers once referred to the Live & Love Crafts store as “a Disneyland for crafters” –  I don’t think one can get a nicer compliment than this!

For me it was a must to include Pion Design’s beautiful papers in Live & Love Crafts’ product portfolio. The papers are unique and I love the soft vintage tones and the feminine patterns. My favourite Pion Design collection is Fairytale of Spring, but I’m also very fond of the Studio of Memories collection. And the newest collection Alma’s Sewing Room…oh, that one makes my heart beat faster! Pion Design’s papers have a very special place in my heart; not only are they produced in my home country, but also because Pion Design’s Head Quarters is located just a stone’s throw from where I grew up.

There’s always a great deal of anticipation when Pion Design is releasing a new collection, and I’m thrilled to be able to share this excitement with my customers, who adore Pion’s papers as much as I do. Lately, I’ve also noticed an increased interest from UK customers and customers from other parts of the world in Pion Design’s vintage images, and I think it’s wonderful that the Scandinavian style of scrapping with vintage images is spreading globally.

If you would like to find out more about Live & Love Crafts, please visit the stores’ Inspiration and Challenge Blog, where the Live & Love Crafts’ talented Design Team Members on a daily basis share their passion for vintage and shabby chic crafts with inspirational projects.