Making your own gift tags can save you money and also adds a great personal touch to your gift.
The materials you will need can be as basic or fancy as you like, listed below will be the essentials and then the optional extra materials we have found useful.
Basic Materials:
- Scissors
- Thick paper/card
- String
- Paints or pens to decorate
- Hole punch
Useful extras:
- Coloured thread
- Glitter (loose or glue)
- Brusho paint
- Schmincke Aqua Bronze powders
- Fineliner pen
- Washi tape
- Tag punch
- Trimmer
To start with you need to cut paper – we used Daler Rowney Mixed Media paper – into strips of whatever width you like, if you are using a tag punch you may be restricted to certain widths, if you are hand cutting them you can cut as you like.
The tag punch will cut the corners and punch out your hole, if you do not have one you can use scissors to cut the corners off and a hole punch to cut out your hole. We used a single hole punch, yet you can use a standard hole punch and just use one side of it.
Cut out as many tags as you like, if you want to be precise measure them out, if not – like us – just go with the flow and have lots of different sized tags, which we think is great for all your different sized gifts as well.
For decoration we used lots of different materials, we absolutely LOVE Brusho in the store and chose a few colours to use. Brusho is so inexpensive, is beautiful to look at and will last years!
To use Brusho we recommend piercing a hole in the top and sprinkling it over your paper, then spraying it with water. For more info on Brusho check out our blog post all about Brusho!
Fineliners that are waterproof are great for outlining your tags and writing on them! We recommend the Micron Fineliners and the Tombow Calligraphy brush pen for fancy lettering. Both are waterproof so if you put Brusho or watercolour paint over the top they will not smudge.
We also love the Schmincke Aqua Bronze powders – which come in various golds, silver and copper – as they add such a lovely sparkle to your paint. These are very similar to use as Brusho, a little goes a long way!
Once you have your designs tie some string through the hole and you’re done! You could use ribbon, coloured thread or anything you have spare that would look good and still do the job of attaching it to your gift!
The designs you put on your cards can be as simple or intricate as you like, we made some simple Christmas tree triangles and then lots of different designs using Brusho.
