Twelve Crafty Days of Christmas - Day 4: Upcycled Gift Tags

Christmas shopping can be truly stressful.  Fortunately, there are some little conveniences that the mall provides to their customers to lessen the stress.  One of these is the free gift wrapping service.  When we got to the mall yesterday, the first thing we shopped for were gifts for the kids.  And since those toys can be difficult to wrap at times, we dropped them all off at the gift wrap counter and then shopped around some more for gifts for the older kids. ;-)  Although there weren't a lot of people lined up at the counter, there were lots and lots of bags of toys waiting to get wrapped.

The wrapping paper was pretty enough with the star/snowflake swirly design and with the mandatory department store logo, of course.  We had many color options but chose to stick with red and green because purple and orange won't exactly fit in with the Christmas decor at home.  Now here's where today's project comes in - the tags don't coordinate color-wise with the decor either.  I actually find it a bit strange that the gift wrap (no matter which color it was) had gold undertones in it (the swirls) and yet the white gift card had a silver design on it.  And yes, I confess, I am a bit OC, so as soon as I saw the gift tags, I knew I had to modify/upcycle them.

I just wanted to cover up the silver design (it's a graphic of a gift the a heart-shaped bow on top) on the front cover of the gift tag.  I decided to use the small pieces of wrapping paper that are left over to decorate the cards/tags.  I cut the really cute Santas out and pasted the images on the tag.  For the smaller cut-outs, I either drew a border around the image or used washi tape to frame the image.  A really simple and easy way to get everything to look coordinated.  :-)

Here are the finished gift tags, with no trace of silver and all ready for use.  Btw, I used the term "upcycle" because these tags haven't been used yet.  But had I left them alone, I wouldn't have been able to use them.  And that would be a waste.

Materials:  Wrapping paper scraps (Hallmark), red pen (Galaxy), washi tape (All About Scrapbooking), others - gift tags to recycle.