This past Christmas finances were a little tight, so I ended up making some of my own Christmas gifts for friends and family in order to save some money. However, when you make a cute gift, you want cute gift tags to go with it. I discovered it is really easy to make antique looking gift tags.
Here is what you will need:
- Medium sized bowl
- Manilla shipping tags (you can buy these at any office supply store)
- 3 or 4 tea bags
I boiled water and put the tea bags into the medium sized bowl, just as if I was making tea. I then steeped the tea bags in the bowl for about an hour in order to draw out as much of the tea as possible.
Once the tea steeped for long enough, submerge several of the tags into the bowl. Make sure that the tags aren’t overlapping. The amount of time that you submerge the tags will depend on how dark you want them (think Easter eggs). If you want the tags to just have a light tea stain, leave them in for just a couple of minutes. If you want them to have a darker tea stain, you can leave them in for an hour or so.
After the tags have soaked all you need to do is lay them on either a cookie sheet or a piece of foil in order for them to dry. For faster drying, you could even tie the tag to something such as a hanger and let the tags drip dry.
After the tags have dried there are so many things that you can do with them. The Christmas gifts that I created were cookie ingredients in a jar, so I used the tags to create baking instructions. You can also glue pictures to the tags, write things, or embellish with scrapbooking elements.
Have you ever made these kind of tags? How did you decorate them?
What a great idea! I’m not creative but could do this:)