A Little Preparation Equals A Gift in Moments

I'm a huge fan of Bonita Rose's Brown Paper Packages wrapping kits and consider each one of them to be a little present for myself. This month I didn't have a lot of gift giving opportunities so I decided to take my kit and make up a batch of tags that can easily be converted into a heartfelt gift with very little time or effort.

I didn't stress too much about the size - just eyeballed a basic shape that would be large enough to dress up a gift bag and small enough to fit (more or less) on the front of a card.

Here's what I made:

It's a pillow! I thought a little stuffing went well with the "Dreamland" theme.

This morning I wanted to send some Caramel Frito Snack Mix to a friend... (great recipe, I used pecans and peanuts for the nuts and a lot more cereal and pretzels so it wasn't so sweet. Heaven!)

Doesn't it look good? Yummy!

And all I had to do to make it look special is attach one of the pre-made tags to a kraft box. Done. No stress whatsoever.

In addition to what I get in the kits, I keep on hand a selection of kraft gift bags, glassine bags, bread bags and card blanks. By staying with a simple base (I LOVE kraft) I never have to worry about matching my tags to the packaging.

Here's another gift I made with my kit contents. Including the time it took to round up my supplies, I put this together in under five minutes. And it looked like a million bucks. Monochromatic is such a simple way to make a great impression.

The paper lace is just darling when you layer it. 

For this tag, I layered the blue and manilla tags and stamped my image with Azure Staz-On. Then I popped up the blue tag from the manilla one with an adhesive foam dot. Very quick, very easy and so effective.

Hope this post gave you some ideas on how you can plan ahead and then be able to make a gift extra special with very little additional effort.