Homemade Gift Tags

For our first Christmas on a Budget Series project, we start with a simple little no cost craft idea.

Each year, I buy small Christmas themed boxes of tissue to put out for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  They are a little more expensive than regular tissue so I only buy three, one for the living room and one for each of the bathrooms.

This past Christmas the boxes were so pretty that I hated to just put them in the recycle bin.

Instead we cut the top and bottom off each box and then put the strips of cardboard under some heavy books for several days to flatten them.

Once they were flattened out, I traced shapes onto the cardboard and cut them out.  I used plastic templates that came with some photo albums that I purchased years ago but you could use all sorts of things to make your shapes:  a glass, the plastic lid from a small yogurt container, cookie cutters, etc.

Punch a hole in each one and voila… you have lots of free homemade gift tags.

When gift wrapping time comes thread a bit of ribbon, yarn or crochet cotton through the hole you punched and attach to your gift.  If you want to be able to reuse them from year to year, use pencil to write who the gift is to and from.

These could be made from all sorts of things that you’d normally put in the recycle bin; an empty chocolate box or a everyday tissue box with a pretty design.  You could even use empty cereal boxes and then paste colourful paper onto them.  Wouldn’t that be a great craft project to do with your kids or grandkids some rainy afternoon.

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