festive crafts: christmas pudding gift tags

At Christmas time I like to put my personal touch on the gift wrap I use, whether it's drawing on name labels or personalising simple brown paper wrapping with twine, washi tape and metallic pens. This year I decided to make some gift tags of my own and Christmas puddings seemed like the cutest and easiest design to go for so I thought that I'd share the process with you whilst there's still time to get crafty before Christmas. :)

things used to make the gift tags:
double-sided sticky foam pads (or double-sided tape)
a pen or pencil
scissors
round mug/cup
hole punch
brown card - ebay
white glitter card - ebay
glitter foam holly and berries - ebay
twisted twine - ebay
metallic pens - ebay
washi tape - ebay

I'm not sure if this is entirely correct but I took inspiration from the way 3D decoupage is created or at least the way it's layered. First I created my shapes using a small mug to draw around onto my brown card for the pudding body, I was sure to fit as many circles as possible onto each piece of card to avoid unnecessary waste.

I then repeated the process on the back of the white glitter card afterwards drawing the icing shapes using the edge of the circle. I created two lots of icing within each circle, drawing them by hand so that every gift tag is a little different.

I cut out all of the brown circles and a matching number of white icing shapes (giving myself 'the claw') and then punched one hole relatively close the the edge of every pudding circle. Then using foam double sided sticky pads I fixed the two layers together being sure to avoid covering the hole with a sticky pad but making sure that the white card hit it away. This lifted the layers a little from one another still giving me access to the hole-punched hole.

I fixed the pre-cut and already sticky berries and holly to the white glitter paper icing (sometimes before sticking the icing to the pudding..)  this was a bit of a cheat but I can only imagine how bad my misshapen hand would have been if I'd had to cut these details out of card as well!

Finally I fed through some patterned twine approximately 6-8 inches in length, knotting the ends together to make a loop. I'll use my metallic bronze and gold pens to write on the tags and a little christmassy washi tape to fix the twine to my wrapped up gifts.

THE END.

This was easy to do and pretty fun, it's nice to do something creative away from a computer screen from time to time - You should try it. :) Along with some Christmas song or movies in the background of course. :D

♥ abby