When what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer...
Hi crafty friend, it's Amanda from Pear Blossom Press again. I'm continuing my Christmas in July blitz, and today, I'm sharing some quick and easy gift tags.
This project was inspired by my friend Yvonne. She has lots of great ideas and shares them on Instagram. We were talking about ideas for quick Christmas projects and she suggested white embossing on kraft cardstock. I decided to give it a try with the Caffeinated Reindeer for these tags.
To start, I cut a piece of kraft watercolor paper in half so it would fit in my Mini Misti. I used a powder tool before stamping the reindeer in Versamark ink. Then, I coated the images with white embossing powder and heat set them. I stamped and heat set two at a time to make it go faster.
Next, I used the coordinating die to cut them out. Saving one sheet that I cut them out from, I lined it up in my Misti, upside down, and placed the TO and FROM stamps from Pawlidays on the back of one of the die cut reindeer. That creates a jig to perfectly line the die cuts up and stamp the words in the same place each time. I repeated the embossing process on all eight.
Locking tweezers are helpful for removing the die cuts and holding them while embossing, but since I was doing so many at the same time, I opted to use the clip on my clipboard to hold down the reindeer and heat set all of them at the same time. I was careful not to overheat them, so I wouldn't remelt the powder on the front sides, and possibly stick to the next reindeer.
At this point, I could have stopped and just added the cords, but the kraft paper I used was lighter than usual and I wanted to punch them up a bit. I used some Walnut Stain ink and a Cotton Tail brush to blend on a little color on the fronts, then a baby wipe to clean up the white embossing powder. To add a pop of color, I used a red marker on the noses.
After that, I simply punched a 1/16" hole in the antlers and threaded a few inches of gold cord through to tie off.
They were really cute, but I am a lover of all things bling, so I glued red gems over the noses to jazz them up a bit more. What do you think?
I love having a big collection of tags on hand at Christmas. It seems like we go through tons of them each year at my house. You can make ones like this, or change the color of the cardstock and the images to suit your needs. If you want to skip the embossing, you can use a white pad, or an ink darker than your paper, for a tone-on-tone look. And if you don't have coordinating dies for your images, you can stamp on circles, squares, or rectangles.
Thanks for stopping by today. You can find the sister article to this on my blog. Head on over for links to the specific products I used. And if you'd like to see another fun tag using this stamp, you might like this. I'll be back soon with more fun cards to share.
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