upcycled christmas tags and wrapping2

Upcycled Christmas gift tags

upcycled christmas tags and wrapping2

Happy Christmas in July! If you have been reading the blog for over a year or two, you would have known this has been coming. Each July I write a series of posts dedicated to doing some preparation for Christmas now, so the end of the year isn’t so stressful and busy.

You can see previous posts on planning for Christmas in July here:

This year my chosen theme for Christmas is “An Upcycled Christmas”. If you aren’t familiar with upcycling, it can be defined as:

Upcycling, also known as creative reuse, is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless and/or unwanted products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value. {source}

We have way too much stuff in our house (something I am currently working on decreasing) and it just grows each Christmas as more gifts make their way into our home. I am certainly not a Grinch about Christmas, I love it and love making it a festive celebration, but this year my focus will be on doing it in a more sustainable way. I will still be buying things, but I where I can I want to reuse and create.

My first attempt was to make use of a significant collection of left over family Christmas cards. Each year I have a family Christmas card printed. I know this is pretty old fashioned but is a tradition we have and I do love it. When I order the cards, they come in set amounts, so I always have some left over. I haven’t been able to throw them out for some reason and now I am glad I didn’t as I have upcycled them into Christmas gift tags for this year!

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The talented Kate from Picklebums has been responsible for all of the designs with the exception of last year when I was too disorganised and didn’t have a photo taken on time.

The process to create gift tags was super simple and you could do this with any old cards you had stored at home.

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A simple tag cutter makes easy work of turning the old cards into tags. Some of the cards had no words in the middle so this meant I could use this side to create plain blank white tags and attach other cut out shapes from the cards on them.

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Then for some tags, I just cut out the tag shape on the front and had cut images as the front.

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I normally buy a large roll of premium quality Christmas paper each year, but I realised this wasn’t going to work this year. On a recent visit to an op shop I picked up some old sewing patterns and thought I would give them a try as wrapping paper and I love the way it turned out.

Make sure you check the prices at the op shops. I picked up these for $0.25 each, but at another shop I saw them for $1.25 each, so shop around for the right price.

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When it came to the string, I again usually buy fancy ribbon, but this year I went to the kitchen cupboard and am using the kitchen string which I never seem to use for cooking purposes and am using that for gift wrapping.

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Have you upcycled your old Christmas cards and if so what did you make?