Papertrey Ink December 2016 Blog Hop

This month on the Papertrey Ink Blog Hop, Nichole gave us this beautiful image as inspiration for our projects. I love the bright punch of colors after working with mostly darker jewel tones in the last few months while I made all of my Christmas Cards. However, it was actually the medallions that inspired my project to begin with and then it snowballed from there.  *Ü*  I had my own little wrapping party for a few small gifts, making my own gift bags from Scrapbook Paper and Wrapping Paper.

I've actually been meaning to make these Paper Medallions for a while but the inspiration image was just what I needed to kick start my project. To make my medallions, I started with two strips of the gold foiled paper 11 x 1.5 inches wide and then scored them at the half inch marks all along the length and repeated that to get a nice sharp crease.

I used my stainless steel stylus/rub on tool for making these particular creases using this particular paper. The foiled paper is from the Hobby Lobby Be Bold, Be Bright Paper pack.  It's not cardstock, but it's heavier than most patterned paper.  I still have tons of this paper left from the initial pad of 84 sheets and most of the time I'm only using a quarter of a sheet for a card. The stylus came several years ago with a set of rub on's from American Crafts.  It makes the scoring lines really nice and folding the accordion strips easy to do.  It's probably the only time I prefer it over a teflon bone folder. Once you have your strips creased and folded you can glue the ends together making a loop.  If you aren't sure what I mean, you can see a video tutorial from Betsy Veldman here.  I don't think I could possibly explain it in a way that makes it understandable so just watch the video. It's only about 4 minutes long, so a short one for sure. My strips of paper are longer than the ones Betsy used, but the concept is the same. It just depends on how full you want your medallions to be and I don't have the Snowflake Medallion Die. You can also use border punches to make your edges lacy looking. Since I wanted the What The Doodle Snowflake to be the focus of my medallions, I didn't use a border punch. The inspiration image uses stars but the snowflake is symmetrical and works well for this.  The nice thing about this technique is that any paper works - even inexpensive copy paper works to make the pleated part of the medallions. I used a hot glue gun to assemble the medallions and even to put the gold cord on the back to hang them with.  They can be used for a decoration and/or they can be recycled as well for other packages or another year.  You could even put the hanger over the top of a bottle of wine or sparkling juice as a decoration.

I also assembled my own gift bags using Scrapbook Paper and Wrapping Paper, but you could even use the comics out of the Sunday Paper.  It's nice to be able to make custom sized gift bags or glassine bags using supplies I already have on hand.  There's a ton of videos on YouTube for how to do this as well although most stamp companies have glassines available for purchase. The glassine bag pictured here is made from some fancy vellum that I have but most people use plain old waxed paper from the dollar store.  Since I don't scrapbook anymore, it's nice that I can use some of my supplies in this way although I need to remember to use this vellum on cards too.

If you'd like to try making your own gift bags or glassine bags, I'd recommend that you experiment with a bit of scrap paper first to find out how it creases and folds when you have multiple layers of paper.  Scrapbook paper is pretty heavy to make most gift bags, but wrapping paper is typically too lightweight to work well.  I had a couple of rolls of heavy wrapping paper and that worked the best for Gift Bags.  I used a combination of ribbon and gold elastic cord to make the hangers for these and I preferred the elastic cord.  I picked it up at Hobby Lobby for a dollar or two and I used hot glue to hold it on the backside between a pleat. You could use these on any kind of gift bag, gift card or even a regular gift that has been wrapped.  They were super easy and fun to make.

Thank you so much for stopping by to see my project today.  Be sure to stop over at Papertrey Ink Blog to see all the entries that are being added to the link up. Much of the fun of this monthly event is seeing how each person interprets the inspiration image.