Happy Holidays everyone. My family’s culture is European so for us
Christmas is not just on the 25th but we celebrate the full 12 days with gifts
of gratitude. Many of the ex Commonwealth Countries celebrate
Boxing Day as the day you traditionally give small gifts to the tradespeople or
staff who have worked with you through the year. In Ireland
they have St Stephen’s day and across Europe there are the fests of Le Jour des
Rois and dia de los Reyes Magos.
To
build up the postage corner, there is a small tag from the Hopeful collection,
recycled postage stamps and a Dec 25 tag cut from the Holiday Notes paper.
Start
building the envelopes in the left corner, biggest envelopes first, pointing to
the right, another on top of that pointing up. The large envelopes are just the
right size for gift cards. Finish with a
tiny tag and the resin heart.
In
the spirit of gratitude and giving I am sharing free tutorials over the next
few days. To say thank you for your
support through the year and as a sampler of our workshops we have hosted in
the past. Today we are kicking off with a
Melissa Frances supported by Scrapbook Adhesives by 3L.
This project has lots of layers of envelopes,
tags, stickers, embellishments and trims that are the personalization and make
your project uniquely U. A tag is a good base to build a gift card, with
little pockets for the gift certificates and personalized with special messages
that tell them what they mean to you.
Products
Ranger
Craft Tag size 10 ( 8 ½” or 22cms)
Scrapbook
Adhesives E-Z tape runner
Versa
Color Inx Petal Pink
Thin
ribbon to tie off the tags
Grey
felt tip pen or copic
Green
Honeycomb paper
Holiday
Notes paper
Green
velum envelopes
Tags
and die cuts from Holiday Notes, Hopeful, Vintage Treasures, C’est la Vie
Resin
frames and a heart
Green
pompom trim
This
is a classic and pretty project that
does not take much time to finish. One
of my favourite time savers is to use the right tools or products, like
Scrapbook Adhesives tape runners. Their
velum tape is very clear or hardly shows at all. All of the Scrapbook Adhesive
tapes hold really well on all kinds of surfaces. Even the fabric pompom trim
holds firm with Scrapbook Adhesive tapes.
Directions:
Cover
the jumbo tag with Melissa Frances Honeycomb paper.
Cut
the countdown date strip from Melissa Frances Holiday Notes and attach to the
left side of the tag. Add pompom trim behind the tag on the left side.
This
post card tag is from Melissa Frances’ Christmas Collection but there are lots
of postcard images in the Melissa Frances range of papers and tags, if you
wanted to try something different.
The
Melissa Frances velum envelopes come with plain white tags. You can use these as a template to cut
colorful tags from matching papers. Or use some of the tags from C’est la vie,
Hopeful, Vintage Treasures, or the Holiday collection. This is a great place to add special messages
that tell the recipient how much they mean to you.
One
of the things I love about the Melissa Frances resin trims is that they take
colour so well. Because we want this to
be a quick project I rubbed them down quickly with a light touch of the petal
pink ink and set it aside to dry. Then
to give the details emphasis, another quick wipe accented the details nicely
when the 2nd coat dried a deeper shade.
A good trick for
bringing a collage together is to hand draw
stitching around the edges of all the trims and envelopes with a pen or doodle lines. That tricks your eye into
seeing everything as being connected.
There you go, a quick and easy gift card
holder with personality. Would love to
see you soon in one of my full workshops that include introductions to mixed
media techniques on the My Creative Classroom website. This is a little peek from one of the Mail Art workshops.
