Quick & Easy Holiday Gift Tags

I like my gift tags to be nice, but simple. I spend so much time on making beautiful Christmas cards, that by the end of it, I want my tags to be easy.

First I found some double sided Designer Paper that I really love (sorry, can't remeber which company). I then picked one of my tag stamp sets. (I own two - Hero Arts LL885 Winter Whimsy (so cute!) and SU Holiday Woodcuts). In this case I chose to use the Woodcuts, simply because I think I may have used the other last year - lol.

I used the colours Night of Navy & Ruby Red. They were colored in with blender pens picking ink off the lid of the stamp. (With your SU stamp pads closed, press the lid against the ink pad. When you open it up ink residue will be left on the underside of the lid. Use your blender pen to pick up the residue and color! This is a great resource if you don't own a coordinating pen to colour with). Then I raised up the image with dimensionals, punched a heart in the corner and attached a ribbon. I wrote the names in with a Green Galore pen to add some extra colour.

And voila! Easy tags that are still nice and add a handcrafted touch to your gift. I made sixteen tags in an hour. Roughly 3 minutes per tag. Not too bad!

Applying Rubber Stamps to Acrylic Blocks

My very first tutorial for you all!

I was so excited last week when my Starving Artistamps Creatures arrived in the mail. But I quickly realized I was unsure what to do with them. They were a fantastic price (just over $3 each) because you only get the rubber - no cushion or wood block. I hadn't thought about the cushion part and thought I could hire my husband (a carpenter) to make blocks for me. Wrong. Ok, perhaps it could have been done with contact cement, but then you still have the cushion issue, and a water solubility issue. So I did some Googling.

That led me to needing to venture into the arena of Acrylic Blocks. I have always used wood based stamps so had no idea what to do. I quickly found out I needed a product called EZ-Mount. Unfortunately EZ-Mount googling for retailers in Calgary turned up nothing. And I didn't want to have to place an order online and wait even longer to use these fantastic sets. So I headed to Michaels today. They have plain acrylic blocks, but nothing for mounting (a word to the wise). So I went to a local Scrapbooking store. Not only did they have the EZ Mount, but they had the acrylic blocks at half the price of Michaels! Woohoo!

So, here we go:

Supplies needed - Acrylic block, rubber stamp & Thin EZ Mount (supposedly it is also sold in thick, there just wasn't that option at the store I was at).

The instructions were all written out on the EZ Mount which was great. First, you peel back the adhesive layer and stick on all of your rubber stamps.

Then cut them out using your rubber scissors (I used my SU Craft Rubber Scissors) as close to the stamps as possible.

Then peel back the static layer, and apply to the acrylic block! The nice thing is that once you are done stamping, the rubber stamp peels off ready to be replaced with the next one you wish to use. One block and a multitude of stamps. Excellent.

Here's the stamped image result:

I shouldn't really compare the wood versus acrylic given I have only stamped using an acrylic block once. But, I did find it to not be quite as comfortable in your hand which might be a tad uncomfortable if you were doing a multitude of cards. Thankfully there is also the option with Starving Artistamps to buy some of their sets wood mounted. You just pay a higher fee.

Now to use this monkey on a card.... off to do some work :)