I am not one to follow the crowd. So rather than do Christmas in July, I am striking out on my own and doing Christmas in August! Or, to be more accurate, I’ve been thinking of making a slew of gift tags for Christmas, birthdays, and whatever other holidays I think would work to give as gifts and decided to start with Christmas so I can do a Stash Bash with it. And August seemed as good a time as any to do that.
Pictured above are stars from Ms. Sparkle & Co. from DCWV. I picked them up at Joann’s ages ago and they’ve just been hanging out in my stash looking for a project to land on. Gift tags for Christmas seems an excellent place to plant them. I tried to find them to link to, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. They are Ms. Sparkle & co. Star Pearls – Silver & Gold 61 ct. Also up there are decorative brads from Pebbles. They come from the 2018 Cozy & Bright collection and I picked them up at Tuesday Morning ages ago. And then there’s the washi. The paper pad is the North Pole Gazette collection and in addition to almost a full pad of paper, I also purchased the three rolls of washi. I can’t find one of the rolls, although I know where it should be so I’ll check there one more time. In reality, it doesn’t matter that much. I have a stack of washi tape and can make them all work with the paper, I think.
I pulled out so many Christmas and winter related stamp sets, but the first time around, I’m going to stick to the Christmas stamps. I’ll incorporate the winter stamps possibly later. The three sets above are Christmas Cheer by Simon Says Stamp, Tim Holtz Stampers Anonymous Christmas Time CMS352, and Sunny Studios Merry Sentiments. This last one seems perfect for the tag size I’m starting with, so I think I’ll end up using them a lot.
The other items I’ll be using are first and foremost, the Recollections Creative Tags in Kraft. I’ve had them for years and always intended to make tags for the front of cards or for gift giving, but they just hung around. My goal is to use up all of them. I have a pack of Snow & Cocoa ephemera I bought last year at Tuesday Morning. It has a variety of card stock and acrylic pieces, banners, little postage stamps, and other cute things. While this collections is discontinued and is no longer available, I did just see different parts of the collection at my local Tuesday Morning.
I am thinking of making larger tags and for that reason I grabbed my Pink & Main Arch Tag Dies. (I would strongly suggest checking out the Pink & Main die sets as they are priced very well.) I also snagged my Tim Holtz Woodland Layering Stencil for when I do the larger tags. I thought a snowy tree background might be fun.
I have a lot of other bits and pieces I’ll probably grab along the way, including ribbon, Stickles, Nuvo Crystal Drops, and other embellishments. The goal is to have a pile of Christmas gift tags to divvy up between family members.
I hope you’ll join me to see the progress I make this month!
CraftyAs 