Christmas Card and Gift Tags

The inspiration for our family holiday card this year came from this four sided Christmas card we received from a dear friend several years ago. I loved the simple elegance of her card and knew I would one day try to do something similar. When I saw Dreaming Tree's Holly Christmas card this year, I immediately knew I wanted to use it to do a four sided card.

What I didn't realize at that time is that the beautiful and intricate filigree cutfile would take way too long to cut. I ended up having to simplify the design drastically, and even then it took my poor Silhouette machine over 30 minutes to cut just 2 panels. I also found I had to allow the machine to rest between cuts or it would overheat and stall in the middle of a cut. That's when I decided to change our card into a three sided one instead.
Despite all the trauma associated with the cutting process, I was pretty happy with the final result. I used gold foil board on the base of the card to add our sentiment and added gold foil holly leaves and red glitter berries for accents.

I put together these penguin gift tags to gift our holiday chex mix to friends and family this year. The adorable penguin svg cutting file comes from Marjorie Ann Designs' Snowball Fight Penguins set.

Also did several of these quickie Peeking Santa Bear tags using a die by the same name from Cottage Cutz Designs.

More Christmas Gift Card Holders

Our trusty mail carrier got this fun  cardstock version of a postal mail drop box from us this year for Christmas.

The front opens up and inside is a letter for her with a gift card inside.

Then for my daughter who wanted a Lulu Lemon gift card, I made a miniature Lulu Lemon look a like bag by creating a digital image of the design on the actual bag and using it to fill, print and cut using Make the Cut Design program. Giving giftcards can be fun for the giver and the recipient when you can think up some innovative ways to present them.

Slippahs for Christmas

I guess most everywhere else these are called "Flip Flops", but here in the islands most of us grew up calling them "Rubbah Slippahs". Anyway, I thought it would be kind of fun to use these paper "Flip Flops" as gift card holders this Christmas. Thanks to Pinterest, I was able to track down a freebie cutting file for these at Paper Dolls blog, here. 

The freebie cutting file is for a taller,  more feminine, wedge style or deeper box (about 2 inches in height) but since I also wanted to make these for guys, I altered the cutting file by decreasing the height of the box to approximately 1 inch for the guys. For the design on the flip flops, I found a file for digital paper that looked almost like a tapa print and used it to do a fill, print and cut on my Silhouette.

        I cut inserts to fit inside each box with tabs cut to hold the gift cards in place.

Just for fun I ran the bottom panel or sole of flip flops through Couture Creations Candy Stripe embossing folder to add some some texture.

For the ladies, I kept the 2 inch height to the flip flops. I used a digital hibiscus border design to use as a fill pattern and did a print and cut for the tops. Since these boxes were deeper, I added paper shreds so the insole inserts with the gift cards would sit higher in the box.

The outsoles were run through an embossing folder with a tiny flower pattern for texture. I made seven pairs of these for Christmas gifts, and  also made boxes just the right size for each pair of flip flops to fit in. These were so much fun to make and give because they really looked so much like the real thing.