Hi, crafty friends! Brace yourselves for a text heavy post. Every year, I seem to make more than enough Christmas cards to send out, but I always scramble last minute to get gift tags done. Not this year, I’ve made quite a few, and here are a couple more, featuring snowmen from the Snow Much Fun digi stamp set from Streamside Studios.

For these tags (I’ll have more to share later), I did compartmental crafting. Tim Holtz always raves about this, but I usually sit down and create my cards from start to finish in one sitting. Actually, that’s not entirely true, I do prefer coloring one day and making the rest of the card another day. Coloring takes a while, and once I’m done with that, I’m not really in actual making and assembly mode.

For these tags I did things a little differently. I colored lots of snowmen at once using my Prismacolor Premier pencils. I usually use my Copics, they’re so much faster, but for this I wanted a less bright look, and printed my snowmen onto Rustic White cardstock from Papertrey Ink. In another crafty session, I used various stencils with different pastes to create textured backgrounds, which I later cut down to tags. For these two I used the Falling Snow slimline stencil from Simon Says Stamp and the Snowflakes stencil from Ciao Bella, both using Light & Fluffy Modeling Paste from The Crafter’s Workshop onto Classic Kraft cardstock from Papertrey Ink. Both of these stencils are fairly large, so I got several tags out of each of the backgrounds I created.

In yet another crafty session I stamped and heat embossed a bunch of different small sentiments from Norsk Stempelblad AS, as well as a god jul seal from Poppydesign, the seals in Gilded embossing powder from Brutus Monroe and the sentiments in White super fine detail embossing powder from Ranger. I used green cardstock from the Christmas in Norway collection from Pion Design, which is an older collection, and it was a great opportunity to shrink my pile of scraps a little bit. Most of the patterned paper pieces I’ve used for these tags are from the same collection, with a few being even older. I used my Happy Days Ticket Stubs die from XCut to create the small pieces that I clustered together. This is the same die I pretty much always use for my clusters on my cards. It’s one die that cuts out nine tickets, and it’s my favorite die to use for my scraps. They don’t look like scraps when they’re die cut. I also just cut some strips using my trimmer and tore the edges for an uneven look, and used a die from Altenew to create small die cut pieces of solid color to tuck behind my other elements to break up all the perpendicular angles a bit.

I used foam tape on some of my elements, but not all, and die cut a reinforcer from green cardstock using a die from My Favorite Things. To finish off I tied May Arts natural twine through the holes and added a charm to each of the tags.

For the back of the tags I used a tag die from My Favorite Things to die cut from more of that Classic Kraft cardstock from Papertrey Ink. I die cut a bunch of tags in one session, so I’d have many to do at once when I did the actual assembly. I stamped an older Inkido stamp using Jalapeño Popper ink from My Favorite Things, and even did some second generation stamping. I also used a couple of stamps from the Distressed Patterns stamp set from MFT to add additional spatter beyond the 24.12 stamp. I used more of the scraps I die cut and cut with my trimmer, and stamped a to/from stamp from Inkido onto scraps of Pion Design patterned paper using Dark Chocolate ink from Papertrey Ink. First generation stamping on one, second generation on the other for a softer look. It was fun to break out acrylic blocks to use with my stamps again, I use my Misti for pretty much everything, but this didn’t have to be perfect or straight, so I just played and had fun!