I love Christmas cards – and I always have a really hard time throwing them away after Christmas and keeping them year after year isn’t really an option. Particularly when I spend my life trying to declutter as much as possible. So what I’ve taken to doing over the last few years is making gift tags for next year from them.

Quite a lot of cards have writing on the back side of  the picture, so they obviously aren’t usable. A few have pictures which can’t really be used for gift tags – but those are usually pretty few in nature.

First I cut up the cards. They can be big or small, with space for a message or maybe only a name. Whatever works with the cards you have.

Then I make a hole in a corner or at the top using a leather punch. A regular hole punch doesn’t really work as it makes the hole too big.

Then I use left over ribbon to thread through. This year I was using ribbon which I know I must have been holding on to for about 20 years – I bought it on sale in New England before I was even married. That brought back happy memories of a wonderful quilting trip – and it was immensely satisfying to finally use it up.

Finally I put all the tags in a zip lock back and put them away with the left over Christmas wrapping paper – all ready for next Christmas. In my humble opinion they are so much more attractive than bought tags – but I guess that is a personal preference. You’re allowed to disagree!

And it’s so much nicer than throwing all those lovely cards in the garbage!

Helen

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 9th, 2011 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Other Crafts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.