clay gift tags.

The gift making craftiness has begun. It is time for list making, gathering supplies, and making. The boys love making things too. One of the things we started this week is gift tags. We change it up from year to year, and this year decided to make some using air dry clay. It is a really simple process and the variations and possibilities are really endless.


For this first round we rolled out air dry clay fairly thinly and G picked out some stamps. Using a napkin ring (it was the perfect size we needed - you can also use cookie cutters of any shape you like) we cut out circles.


G then took a skewer and pierced a hole in the top of each one. He then stamped them. He did one batch that he stamped "a gift for you" and he added some little embellishments with other stamps around the edge for texture. Stamp words, names, designs, whatever you want.


We let them dry for 2 days. The first day they dried stamp up. We then flipped them over to dry a bit on back too.


You can use them as is - the white clay looks nice. Or, you can paint. We wanted an earthy look to go with some of our tea blend gifts, so we squirt a dab of gold acrylic paint on each disc, made sure the paint was in the sunken stamped areas, and then gently brushed/rubbed with a sponge brush to remove most of the paint from the surface (don't forget the back and edges), leaving the low lying words filled with darker paint. G finished a few dozen happily painting and brushing. Let dry. They look earthy and beautiful and are great for hand made gifts.

You can insert ribbon, raffia or twine through the hole and tie onto your gift. You can leave more generic or you can use the back of the disc to write a name (a paint pen works great). We are planning on making a few more batches of them since they look so nice - some that are long and skinny with stamped names going down the front, as well as a few other shapes/variations with stamps (snowflake, leaf, star). Love it!