It's nearing the end of Friday afternoon, a day of sunshine and showers. I meant to blog yesterday, something about making a notebook, but I was diverted by a basket of quilt blocks. The picture above is of a completed scrap quilt I previously made, one inspired by seeing Chris English's wonderful scrap quilt. (It'd been displayed at the NEC quilt show which, sadly, I'd not attended but had viewed via the wonders of YouTube.) Pretty much as soon as I finished that quilt, I started sorting out fabric for another. I know, I'm a glutton for punishment. Actually, making improv scrap blocks is good fun, and an ideal way to make inroads into your Mount Scrapmore.
Anyway, yesterday morning I began sorting through blocks I'd made for a second quilt, and realised I'd amassed more than I thought.
I started grouping them into colours, seeing where I had the four blocks needed to sew together into one larger block.
I've got enough for a small lap sized quilt, but I'll keep going, wanting something that's bed-sized. So, that was Thursday, lots of playing with scraps and machine-sewing blocks together. Friday's been about making Christmas tags.
Sorry, I mentioned the Xmas word, didn't I? Halloween hasn't even been and gone, but I was thinking Christmassy thoughts. Mainly because I'd seen a craft video by an artist called Elizabeth St Hilaire, and she'd been making Christmas present labels from cardboard tags. The sort of tags you'd traditionally write your name and address on, and tie to your suitcase handle when you're travelling.
Her tags looked terrific, really effective, so I was itching to have a go myself. I didn't have any commercially made tags, so dug out some black sugar paper and a piece of black card - the card having been re-purposed from its original use as the cover of an old sketchbook. I glued two pieces of sugar paper together to give the sturdiness the tags needed.
Then I sorted through my heap of Gelli prints, pulling out any red and gold ones. I cut them into strips and used a glue stick to arrange them on my black card.
I also made a template, deciding on the size of my completed tag. I added rounded corners at the tag's top by drawing around the cap of the glue stick, then trimming with scissors. A hole punch took care of the hole for the ribbon or thread my gift label would need.
I glued four or five strips of printed paper to each piece of card, then trimmed the card to size using my template for a reference, and hole punched the card. Almost complete, but I needed something shiny to make the tags really festive.
Gold paint and a stencil took care of that.
I'm really pleased with how these tags turned out. You could certainly use white or craft-brown coloured card, but I think the black's particularly effective, and you could write your message on the card back with a suitably festive gold or silver coloured pen.
If you want to watch Elizabeth St Hilaire make tags - very different to mine and in a class of their own - there are a couple of videos. This one is good, and here is another. Hope you give these Christmas labels a go (and fingers crossed those links work. I'm not the world's best with technology.) Happy crafting!
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