Adding A Little Handmade Holiday Cheer

Hi All! Welcome to the Rose Blossom Blog Hop featuring some last minute handmade holiday ideas. If you just hopped over from the fabulous Shelly Nemitz's blog, Just One Pretty Piece, you're in the right place. If you're just starting here or you get lost along the way, I have a list of blog participants at the end of the post. Also, make sure you hop by Brenda Rose at Rose Blossom Legacies--she's giving away some lovely goodies! 

I love the idea of handmade holidays, and if you follow my blog, you know I do a lot of home decor projects. But, when all is said and done, I find myself giving a lot of store-bought gifts during the holidays, especially bottles of wine. So I have to content myself with adding little handmade elements to things, and that's what inspired today's project: handmade tags!

Handmade tags are one of the easiest ways to add a handmade feel to any gift and you get a whole lot of bang for you buck. For this set, I used Kraft cardstock, Close To My Heart's White Pine complements pack, Glacier extra thick twine, stamps and ink. Let's take a closer look.

I cut 8 tags to 2 1/4 x 3 3/4 inches and used my scallop corner rounder to to give them a decorative edge. For the two tags above, I inked around the edges with my sponge dauber using White Daisy Exclusive ink and added a variety of stickers and kraft pieces from the complements pack. The "Be Merry" greeting is a combination of stamps from the Miracle of Christmas and Say It All (Hostess Reward) stamp sets. "Be" is masked off from "Believe" and stamped in Fern ink and "Merry" is masked off from "Merry Christmas" and stamped in New England Ivy ink.  The "merry" sentiment on the ornament is masked off from the Doubly Merry stamp and is stamped in Cranberry ink.

For the above tags, I randomly stamped the snowflake from Miracle of Christmas and inked around the edges of the tags with White Daisy ink. I also added Diamond Stickles to these and the other tags for a little extra sparkle. Finally, I used a Pentel Silver Signo pen to draw the string on the ornaments.

For these tags, I stamped some more snowflakes in and added thick plastic and kraft White Pines complements. The little animals on the second tag are stickers from the complements. They would normally have a Glacier blue border around them, but I trimmed it off. You can see the border on the tree below.

Finally, for the last two tags, I used a mixture of elements from the complements. I popped the sentiments up with foam tape. Since they are on clear plastic, I strategically placed Blue Enamel Dots and some kraft complements to hide the foam tape. 

And there you have it. A quick and easy way to add a handmade element to any holiday gift. Now hop on over and see what the super-creative Cathy Arbuckle has for your inspiration at These Eager Hands. And here's a list of participants as promised:

Brenda

Lynn

Marg

Shelly

Kim {that's me}

Cathy

Kim

Have a wonderfully creative day!