Holiday Gift Tag Exchange and tutorial!

2013 Edition of The Silhouette Challenge Gift Tag Swap and a Tutorial

Hi everyone! I'm so glad that you stopped by to take a peek at my gift tags!

As most of you know, I am part of an AMAZING group of ladies (and maybe a gentleman or 2) who participated in The Silhouette Challenge. What is it you ask? It was created by Lauren at The Thinking Closet in order to challenge herself to tackle and share ONE new project per month with the Silhouette Cameo she got for Christmas last year. I have had the privilege of being a member for 11 months now, participating in the Challenge a few times as well as becoming a part of a wonderful family. The ladies that are in this group are so kind and wonderful I feel like I am rubbing elbows with the celebs! This is really the ONLY group on Facebook that I get notifications if someone posts directly to my phone (I'm a member of a TON of groups - but this one gets priority) because I dislike very deeply receiving notifications all day long.

Want in on the fun? Fill out the form here, or to learn more about the challenge visit The Thinking Closet and find out what you may be missing. In case you haven't noticed, I might be Lauren's biggest fan!

Onto the main event:

We had a really fun "scrap" swap a few months ago where the members de-stashed their collections (because, really... what crafter doesn't have TOO MUCH of something?) and sent it to someone else. I got REALLY LUCKY and was able to swap with a friend of mine that lives in South Africa. So I got some really cool stuff that I still need to post a blog about.

During October, we were offered another fantastical opportunity to participate in a gift tag exchange. Everyone who participated would make X number of gift tags, send to The North Pole where they were sorted by Santa's elf and sent back to us in a prestamped envelope.

WAHHHH LAHHHHH 

   Everyone gets different gift tags from all their friends! Awesome!

So, if you're interested, here's a quick tutorial on how I made my tags. 

1. Pick out a design - this is always the hardest part for me because I can never make up my mind. Fortunately, I also procrastinate a lot so I had to choose rather quickly to get them to Santa's Elf in time - 

 

I took red cardstock (regular old cardstock) and found a gift tag shape that I liked. I wanted my tags to fold in the middle, so I took the design and mirrored above to get this. Then, I perforated the middle of the tags to make folding them easier and so that everything would line up.

Then I went to The Silhouette Online Store and bought a Christmas tree file to use. Then I found some green polka dot paper and thought that would be super cute (I was right) in a Christmas tag so I got to work. First take your image and place it in the tag and make sure to size it down to fit inside ONE PART of the tag. Then, copy and paste and see how many you can get to fit on a page!

    Next, I made a little box to cut the polka dotty paper so it wouldn't show out of the edges of the tag but would be JUST RIGHT (kinda like the three bears story).

Then you can arrange the squares on your liner paper and cut a whole bunch of those out at once. I bought 12 papers and only used 1. 

Alrighty, now cut all your tags out and the liner paper boxes. You'll end up with an unexpected bonus...

CHRISTMAS CONFETTI!

{which I believe has already been claimed by my naughty Elf, Jangle. He gets away with more than the average elf because he comes to an adult only house. I think he's the "black sheep" at the North Pole because he does some VERY NAUGHTY things while he's with us.}

Now, once you get everything cut out and punched and all that great wonderful stuff, then you take your tag and place some glue on the INSIDE EDGE so the green square has something to stick to. I used a Zig Stick for this part, and it gets a little messy (maybe its just me that's messy!) and for purpose I put a border of glue around the square as well to make sure that it stuck. stick the square on there and make sure its not poking around the edges (unless that's your thang-in which case, go on with ya bad self) and when the glue dries you can fold them up and decorate them with ribbon or GLITTER!!!! (which was my intention but I ran out of time - did I mention that I procrastinated a bit on this?)

Clear as mud?

 Good!

You should end up with something that looks like this:

(imagine it has beautiful ribbon, will ya?)

NOW FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE:

In no particular order, these are the tags that I received and you can go check out the Linky Party **here** to get to the main event

Thank you so much for stopping by! I hope that you enjoyed my tutorial. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask - and I wish everyone the Merriest of Christmases ever. My challenge to myself in the year of 2014 will be to blog at least ONCE a month (gotta start somewhere) instead of once every few months... so stay tuned.

While you're here and in the Christmas spirit, our most wonderfully talented leader, Lauren of The Thinking Closet has been nominated for an award from the Florida Blogger & Social Media Conference, and if you don't mind could you please go and vote for your favorite in the Home Improvement/DIY/Crafts section? (THE THINKING CLOSET) I'm obviously biased, but Lauren is friends with the other 2 finalists, so if your loyalties lie elsewhere, I will understand (that may be an exaggeration - I am a big fan of The Thinking Closet)

PS - all of the photos on here are MINE and property of me, so please do not use them without asking. Thanks.