31 Day of Before & After ~ Day 21 “Creative Gifting”

WARNING: After reading this post you might get an uncontrollable urge to find an estate sales, garage sale or raid your grandmother’s attic. This is a perfectly natural reaction to what you are about to see, just go with it and enjoy the ride. I am not responsible for any feelings of irritation or disgust at one’s self for throwing away the materials you are about to see used in this post. Again this is perfectly natural, but thankfully there is help just down the road at your local thrift store or numerous estate, garage, yard sales and flea markets.

Next time you go to an estate sale and see that box of old fashioned patterns of clothing from years past, don’t smirk, shrug or walk away. Grab it and quickly walk to the cashier, then run by Hobby Lobby and pick up some handled gift bags. I have a ton of them in natural brown paper sack color so this was one of those projects that I did with junk just laying around my workroom.

Let me just say that I love to give gifts, but more so I love to decorate the vessel in which the gift is given. I want the gift wrap and presentation to reflect my gift selection, the person I’m giving it to and a dash of my personality, and often times I would say that the way a gift is presented is almost better than the gift itself.

Now, in an effort to conform this post to a before and after theme, I have for you one brown paper gift bag and a old pattern.

I believe I received this pattern in a bag of material I ordered from an Etsy CAST team member.  Anita if you did not intend for me to get this…I’m sorry, I’ll buy you another one 🙂

The gift bags in the store are nice, sometimes very costly when you consider the bag, tissue, ribbon and a card.  So why not make your own?

First I tore the package apart and tore the back and front to size.  I didn’t care that that the edges are ragged.  Ha!  no pun intended there.  Anyway…this is how mine came out.  Then I glued the front of the package to the front of my bag and the back part to the back of the bag.  Doing the back  isn’t necessary but I thought it was cute.

By the way…this is not an original idea from me.  I saw this in an antique mall and gasp, not so much at the price, it wasn’t all that bad, but then I later went to another antique mall and found some patterns…wow!  $3.00 a pop!  yikes.  So that’s what I mean by estate or garage sales.  Better yet ask a family member if the have any lying around that you can take off their hands.

Cute.

Next I took the one sheet of pattern that was not cut up and cut it in half the stuffed into the bag for the tissue paper.

Then…

I found a remnant of material and snipped the edge and ripped into a strip for the ribbon.

Then…

I thought while I’m at it, I might as well make the card.  So I found the instruction sheet in the pattern pieces, located some painters paper left over from our floor project ( you can use any paper, but this went with my theme) I folded and cut the paper using my vintage pinking shears (they are as old as Methuselah, really!)

Then…

I cut out the imagine on the front of the pattern instructions, you know…the one that says your finished product should look like this.  Yeah right!

I kind of wanted the whimsical effect so I glued it on crooked…on purpose.

Then…

I put it all together…I even took the opportunity to use one of the mini cloths pins that I’m so ga-ga over.

oh and here’s the back

I mean come on…you really think anyone cares if there is anything inside this gift bag.

They’ll just love the bag!

and the fact that YOU made it for them!

So what are you going to do at that next estate sale?

Better hurry before I get there!

By clicking the photo above you can check out the other participants of the 31 days of change!

Click here to see all Before & After posts to date

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See ya tomorrow!

Linking up and sharing my style at these fabulous parties:

Handmade In TX: Lone Star Showcase #9

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