Firstly thank you to everyone for your Birthday wishes on my previous post! It means so much to have such lovely, supportive readers and followers, and I’m over the moon that my little blog is one year old!
Anyways onto the reason for this post! After seeing many of my fellow bloggers sharing their Christmas craft ideas, I thought I would take the plunge myself. Someone had mentioned on their blog that creating gift tags out of pictures of your pets is a great personal touch to gift giving, plus a very cheap alternative! (If you are the blogger who suggested this, please let me know, as I have completely forgot who it was… a to hazard reading so many blogs!) I had also played with the idea of making my own gift wrap, but decided one craft afternoon was enough for me this year… maybe next year I’ll do more! I will talk you through how to make the gift tags above;
1- Firstly you need a willing volunteer, who will become your muse! I used both my dogs, one is photogenic (George the black and white one) the other could not be less impressed with a camera (Archie the ginger one). George even got into the Christmas spirit and allowed me to decorate him with ribbons…he’s such a daft pretty dog!
2- So after you have your picture of your pet you need to make the picture Christmassy. I did this by super imposing a Christmas hat onto each of the dogs, and writing a greeting on them. I then printed the pictures out on card.
3- I decided to add some glitter to my tags to make them a bit more special. I added glitter to certain areas by using a wooden skewer, however anything with a pointed edge will work fine. I dipped my skewer into a PVA glue and dabbed in onto the areas I wanted to.
4- Next you need to sprinkle glitter onto the card, which will then stick to the areas that are glued. Try to shuffle the card around so you can cover all the tags evenly. Then stand the card vertically and tap it onto some newspaper so the excess glitter falls off the page.
5- Once you have added glitter detailing to all your tags you can them cut them up and use a hole-punch to make a clean hole for your ribbon.
6- You can now thread ribbon or string through the hole, so that the tag can be attached to your parcel.
7- You now have your pretty personalised Christmas tags, ready to be attached to your Christmas gifts. I think these tags add a little something extra to your gifts and make them stand out from the others underneath the tree.
So what do you think? Do you like the idea of homemade gift wrap and tags? Have you been getting crafty for Christmas? Do you regularly give homemade gifts on special occasions?
