Valentine's Day Crafts: Mini-envelopes/ Tea bags

I've been shopping around for creative ideas for Valentine's Day for a little while now. I'm going on a little family vacation and returning home on Valentine's Day itself, so I thought it would be nice to leave little presents for my Valentine to open while I'm away. One interesting find that inspired me was from Design.Wash.Rinse.Repeat.com with Valentine's Day Tea Tags (with printables). I thought I would design my own tea tags and individual tea bag wrappers.

The wrappers/ mini-envelopes were really simple to make and here is how you can too :)

Gather up your equipment and materials: Ruler, Scissors, Pencil, White Glue, a few Sheets of construction paper.

Step 1: The template!

I first made a template out of pink construction paper. I drew a rectangle the size of the tea bag that I wanted and added some flaps to it that were long enough to reach each other to glue together. Just glue along the edges and leave one flap "unglued".

As you can see above I made a tester to check the sizing. (I was still free styling the design)

After you finalise your template design, use your template and outline its shape unto some scrapbook paper (or any other paper of your choice). Cut out your pattern. Scour where your folds would be, by running a scissors along those lines. Fold your mini envelope and glue the flaps into place.

You should have a completed mini-envelope! The next step is to decorate.

Cutting out the squares

I designed some tags on my computer  saying "Be Mine" and cut them out. My original thought was to include some cute sayings, ("you suit me to the tea" or "orange you glad to be mine" for orange flavored tea) BUT THEN! I found some free vector graphics at Vector Graphics Blog. The 3 x 3 squares with little hearts on them were adorable and were just the right size for my envelopes. Also I thought the black and white theme seemed more masculine and perfect for a guy for valentine's.

After you cut them out, the next step is to simply stick them onto your envelope as seen below. I chose to take mine a step further.

Sequins, buttons and embroidery thread. Extra embellishing!

Because of the squares had a sort of stitched look to them, I decided to use red thread and some sequins to add a little dimension to my hearts. I also dug up some old white buttons and white embroidering thread.

Lots of careful hand stitching later, I came up with the following:

Ta-da!

Turns out that my Valentine is more of a coffee person than tea and I think the final products look too nice for a mere tea bag. I think I'll be using them with cute notes instead. I have just the container for them!

The great thing about this envelope-template design is that you can adapt it to make bigger envelopes. So custom greeting card envelopes, or gift envelopes for jewellery and other small gifts, or even at this size- gift tags!

I hope you all were extra inspired by these! I tried to keep it simple on the design to help out some friends of mine, but feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions or if you were extra inspired to make some of your own.

Happy crafting :)

Christmas Crafts- Cards

After my Christmas Gift Box Craft, I had some extra materials and some 5x7 precut greeting cards so I decided to make some Christmas cards for 2 special people in my life that I didn't give Sayada's Trini Greeting cards. They were quite easy to make and the process can be used throughout the year.

Here's a glance at what I made below.

Card (Right): Red Decorative Napkin, Gold Reindeer Gift Paper, Gold Ribbon, Red Foil Poinsettia Sticker
Card (Left): Red Decorative Napkin, Gold Christmas Gift Paper, Gold Glitter, Gold Decorative Studs

I wanted to spice up the envelopes as well so I used one of the red foil stickers that I used on the card to embellish the envelope

Christmas Crafts (Tutorial?)

This year I was looking for a new way to wrap some presents, and when my mom bought some gorgeous metallic gift paper, I knew I had to attempt a gift box. The paper was so beautiful. I couldn't resist using it in some craft project. 

The following is a basic overview of how to go about making your own.

So firstly is gathering the materials. I used pretty complementary gift paper, some cloth ribbon from last year's gift wrapping that matched the gift paper, a red decorative napkin, some Elmer's white glue and an old perfume gift box.

Materials: Gift paper, Burgundy Cloth Ribbon, Red Decorative Napkin

Once I sorted out all my materials, I used the cover as a guide and cut the gift paper with enough excess to also cover the sides as well as to fold into the other side of the box. This ensures that the edges of the box had a nice classy finish.

Ideally, you should cut a large piece of your main background paper (in my case, Gift Paper #1) and cover your box first with it and then cut your decorative piece (GP #3) and stick over it. (See next photo below) I personally did not do that because I didn't want to waste the gift paper that would have been hidden by GP #3. 

I was however very careful as to where I added the glue on the box to stick the paper. I only put on the edges of the box, where there would be an overlap of gift paper and in a few choice spots. This is my personal preference when using liquid glue to get a smooth finish on the surface of the box. I find that sometimes the same pattern that you apply the glue in, ends up showing up through the paper when you stick it. 

Next I stuck a piece of the burgundy cloth ribbon to add some texture and contrast to the gold gift papers. Later on, after completing the entire box, I decided to use some gold studs that I had been dying to use for some extra embellishments and to hide some of the glue stains that seeped through the ribbon.

Wrapping the cover and where to place the materials.

For the bottom half of the box, I opted to use the gift paper with the most gold tones in it to cover the bottom part of the box. It was the least fussy of all the gift papers and would not detract from the cover.

I was averaging the size of the gift paper with the box as guide and because I was not measuring it to the exact proportions of the box with my handy ruler (laziness on my part), I ended up with the paper in the inside lip of the box being at different lengths. I was not too worried because I already planned to line the box. 

I used a thick decorative napkin that I cut with 1 cm in excess on all sizes. I ended up folding the excess behind to make the napkin to size and this I thought was a much nicer surface than a cut edge to line the box. (Kind of like why you hem clothes) I also put the glue on the excess that was folded back so that if any glue seeped through, it was not visible.

Underneath of Box and lined inside.

When the entire box was properly covered, I checked to see if I wanted any extra embellishments to enhance it, e.g. glitter, sequins, stamps, etc. In my case, I simply used some gold studs on the burgundy ribbon. My roommate once picked off all the gold studs from a shirt she bought for a presentation to make it more professional. We didn't know what to do with them at the time, but 2 years later, they finally had a use!

After I filled the box with my gifts, I used the remaining Burgundy cloth ribbon to tie a beautiful bow.

Finished box (without the embellishments)

And that's how you make a very pretty gift box!

Merry Christmas everyone. Hope you all get extra creative this year :)