Holiday Crafting 2011.

I wanted to show you what I made for my friends for christmas – I’ve been making these gifts, on and off, for such a long time I feel like I ouught to have mentioned it, but the problem with having your 3d friends reading your blog is that you really can’t blog about any of your Christmas crafting, or they’ll know exactly what they’re getting. Maybe I could find out their IP addresses and block them for a few months before Christmas and their birthdays? That seems a little extreme to me though, so I’ll have to make do with not blogging about my gifts until after Christmas. 


But to cut the rambling short, this year I couldn’t decide on one gift, so I made a little collection of gifts for my friends. A smorgasbord of DIY’s if you will, including;

• Limoncello
• Vanilla Essence
• Mulled Wine Kits
• Lush style moistursing bath bars
• Hot chocolates on spoons
• Christmas cookie boxes

And even though it’s waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late to be used for your 2011 crafting, I thought I’d take the next few days to show you what I made and how I did it. {Unfortunately, like a dunce, I didn’t take photo’s of the stages, but everything was uber simple so I am sure I’ll be able to explain it.}


I made two different sets of gifts – one came in the little gabled box you see above and the other was a duo of a DIY cookie box and the Hot Chocolates on spoons in a little printed bag.

I’ll start with the packaging and let you know that I fully ‘cheated’. What with all the other stuff I had going on over the last few months, my somewhat lacking photoshop skills and my deep rooted love of the design I decided to use these Holiday Mail Stripe tags, by one of my favourite crafty bloggers Eat Drink Chic, as my starting point and work everything around them. I la-la-love the little reindeer stamp, and the colour scheme. 
So I printed a bunch of the tags for general use, and then set about mixing up the design a little where needed in photoshop. 
For the majority of the labels, I just wrote the text straight on to them, using Scribble Box as my main font and Pea Jenny Script as my secondary font. Once I was happy with the text it was just a case of printing them, cutting them out and rounding the corners – mostly to hide my uneven cutting skills but also because I just think it looks more finished. 
For the larger labels on the cookie box and the gabled kraft box, I had to do a little cutting and shutting as when I stretched the label, it understandable looked odd, so it was a case of piecing together the reds and blues until they were even. 
The gift bags were printed from here. No modification, no nothing. Just a little bad gluing!
So there you have it – my packaging! 
Tomorrow, I’ll go through my Limoncello recipe and bottling!