{Spotlight Project} Maria Makes A Gift Bag From Recycled Paper

I was straightening up my overflowing (no surprise there, eh?) gift wrap collection and found several rolls of brown paper I had saved. In Germany, gift wrap is rolled onto a spool of rolled up thinner-than-cardboard-but-thicker-than-packing-paper brown paper. So I decided to make a gift bag out of it. You may have seen this in the Love TAGplorations hop. Today I'll tell you how I made it.

STEP 1

I usually stitch up brown paper bags like this (especially to gift a set of cards) as rectangles. But I thought - "why not make a circle for a change?". So I got out a soup bowl with an 8" diameter and my supplies, knowing I was going to dress it up a little. I used Pocket Blooms, Luggage Tags and Zen Hearts.

STEP 2
Traced the bowl onto the brown paper and cut it out. Twice.

STEP 3

I put down a line of temporary adhesive along the top edge where the opening will be (and make a pencil mark on the reverse to show where to start and stop sewing!) and a few little spots around the perimeter before adhering the second circle. This keeps the two pieces together for sewing. Thanks to the opening at the top edge I can reach in and rub off the adhesive when the bag has been stitched.

 STEP 4

 I laid out some elements I wanted to use to embellish the bag. Decided roughly where I wanted the stenciled heart...

STEP 5
... and inked it with white pigment ink. When it was dry, I offset the stencil and dabbed light pink dye ink through it too.

STEP 6

Stamped the posies onto the doily with the same pink ink. And die cut a pocket for the posies from gold glitter CS. Added a little punched heart to the pocket too.

STEP 7

Channeling a bit of Rebecca L., I made a tassel as an embellishment. Wrapped some crochet thread around a piece of cardboard (happens to be the packaging from the pocket die that's part of Pocket Blooms) about 15 times. Slipped it off the cardboard and tied some gold thread around the middle of it. I used a pencil to get all the loops lined up nicely and holding the tassel in the middle, snipped the ends.

STEP 8

When I had the bag embellished, I decided it needed to be gussied up a bit more. So I pulled out the small circles from Artsy Tribal Doodles and heat embossed some in gold. This tied in nicely with the other gold elements - sentiment, pocket die cut and thread.

 Here's the final product again. Hope I've inspired you to do some recycling when creating a project. Or maybe just to make a tassel!

If you try out any of the techniques from our Spotlight posts, don't forget to hook your project up at our Spotlight Project Showcase gallery!

Tschüss,
Maria

Products Maria used in today's project:

Luggage Tags

Zen Hearts

Artsy Tribal Doodles

Pocket Blooms