The holiday season is just around the corner. It is always a busy time of the year; sending out holiday greetings, going to parties, food preparation, home decorating, shopping, finding a parking space at the mall…
But most of all: giving gifts. And everything to do with them: buying, wrapping, labeling…
And no time for fun and creativity with crafts. But maybe not…
Here is how I found a solution regarding holiday cards.
No, it is not: How to get a cute Christmas card picture by torturing your children and pets by making them wear homemade “elf hats”. It is hard to see in this picture of an old picture but even Miss Jane (small pug on right) is wearing an elf hat made just for her! Unfortunately, she didn’t appreciate my stylish efforts.
It is to talk about making gift tags using recycled greeting cards.
Holiday cards and friends remind me of hotdogs.
You might be saying, “Huh? Why? They both taste good with mustard?”
No. Not that. That’s weird.
Let me rephrase: Hotdogs and buns. What’s up with selling ten hotdogs in a package and only eight hotdog buns in a package? Who came up with that system? And can we please change it? I hate throwing away food.
“I thought this was about Christmas, not a Fourth of July picnic.”
It is. Unless the number of family and friends on your holiday mailing list equals the number of cards in a package or you omit a few folks like Aunt Bee and Cousin Elroy (“yeah, those losers never send me a Christmas card anyway”), then you are going to have leftovers.
Here is what I did with my leftover cards: I got out my scissors, glue, glitter and sequins and made them into package labels. Here are the pictures of my process.
The leftover Christmas card
Step One: Cut out the images
Hint: The simpler the image, the easier to use. Here is a sample of some cards that I found at the 99 cent store that would work perfectly.
From one holiday card, you could make six cute tags. This box had eight cards which translates to 48 gift tags for 99 cents! These images even have their own glitter!
Step Two: Using Elmer’s glue, I attached sequins to plain trees
I tried adding glitter as an outline around the trees once I had them glued onto the inexpensive cardstock paper (easily obtainable at major craft stores) but it was too much.
So instead, for a different look, I used spray adhesive on each tree and then laid them on a special clean piece of paper (see below). I got just a pinch of glitter and sprinkled it over each tree. Remember: Always use spray adhesive over a surface that you don’t care if extra glue gets on it- like newspaper that you can throw away. Also if you have disposable gloves (at Home Depot or Lowe’s in paint section), you might want to consider wearing one on the hand holding the object you are spraying. Otherwise, you get glue on your hand and subsequently glitter. That is, unless you are making a new fashion statement. LOL.
Glitter on Trees
I did these steps before gluing the individual trees onto the cardstock so
1. I can save all my extra glitter and
2. I have glitter on just the tree and not all over the cardstock back.
How you save glitter is by doing this step on a clean piece of paper with a premade crease in the middle. When pieces are dry and ready to remove, take them off, pick up paper and fold up sides and now you can pour the extra glitter left on the paper back into your glitter container.
When the new trees were dry, I added sequins to them
Step Three: Card Stock Backing
Measuring tag dimensions by using trees and then dividing paper into equal pieces
Step Four: After the cardstock was cut, I then glued my trees onto each tag. I used Elmer’s glue as well as a glue stick on the very edges (purple color hard to see as it starts to disappear quickly while I am taking the photo). The reason I used both is that regular glue holds better but squishes out on the edges and makes an ugly glue blob. This is where the glue stick comes in handy for a cleaner looking project.
Step Five: The other thing I did was put them under a heavy book for several hours to help flatten them out as they want to curl up a little as they dry.
Step Six: As you can see below, I decided to cut the four edges off to make the tag a little fancier. For the glitter trees, I outlined them with a green marker and for the plain trees, I used a metallic gold marker. Then I added the writing with a black sharpie.
Final step: Using a hole punch and adding some curling ribbon.
I hope this project has inspired you to being crafty.
If you can make the time, you can make creative and inexpensive gift tag labels and do something good for Mother Earth and yourself: Repurpose.
Another woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure…
