On my continued determination to really nail my Christmas wrapping this year, I came across this idea on pinterest.

The wrapping was similiar to what I had already done for the Christmas wrapping, but I thought that the letters would be a great simple way to tag my Christmas wrapping once I got over the great wet hurdle that is the Atlantic Ocean. I was wary however, of executing an idea from pinterest. Pinterest is great, and neat, and wonderful, but if you look at things on pinterest, you should be legally required to check out this site – http://pinstrosity.blogspot.com/

Not everyone in the world has the same skill levels, and that’s okay too!!!

So here’s what I did.

First I picked a font out that looked fairly classy and not too hard to cut out! I went for Titania, a lovely 1920s vintage font. In in design, I wrote out the letters for each family member (or last name inital if it was for an entire family. I tried to stick to lower case letters for individuals, and capitals for gifts that were for an entire family- i.e. sister Amanda got lower case ‘a’ but the Gibson family got a captial ‘G’) then flipped them over and switched to outlines. No sense in wasting ink.

Then I printed sheets of the letters, and using spray glue, glued the printer paper onto coloured paper.

(I used heavy red wrapping paper in these examples)

Next came the tricky part- cutting them out. This took basically forever, as most of my family members have letters with holes in the middle of them associated with their names. Yay.

You will need an exacto knife or craft knife for this. Next I made spare tags out of the leftover paper, and glued about half of the tags to white bristol board so they’d stand out against the red paper.

The finished tags against one of the specialty papers I bought at the excellent Dick Blick art supply store in Allentown.

I also made longer tags for little gift bags, as below:

Here are some examples of the finished bits, but for the full photo shoot check out the following blog post.