Easy Gift Tags

This morning, I finished my Christmas shopping. I have a few things left to wrap, and a stocking to fill (shh, don't tell the Mister!). And then I'm done!

Normally, I wrap everything up as quick as I can (for fear of presents popping back out of their wrappings, since I'm terrible at it) and write names down with sharpie. Maybe even a not-mostly-dead sharpie, if I can find one.

This year, though, things are different.
Things are pretty, dare I say!

There are plenty of gift tag printables on Pinterest, and one in particular caught my eye - it had 12 different tags and sayings to choose from, and all in calligraphy-type font! Now, keeping in mind, my printer can only do black and white, these were perfect. They had plain backgrounds, so they could be printed on any color of paper or cardstock, and they were gorgeous!

So, I downloaded the "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" tag, and got to printing.

And, of course, this was right when the left side of our toner cartridge started to go out.
The printing turned out horrible and light. I was rather disappointed! The font was beautiful, and my printer just did not do it justice.

So, I broke out a fine tip sharpie, and traced over everything. And my goodness, do I love them!

I'm rather glad the printer went out, since they are now much darker than my printer ever could have gotten them!
However, even with these being printed on cardstock, there is plenty of ink bleed through on the back, so if you do something similar, keep that in mind.

If you look close, you can see where my tracing skills aren't 100% awesome!

Each page you print has five tags, so I ended up with ten of these. They aren't uniform in size, which is fine with me, but was something I didn't realize at first. For the holes, they are a bit larger than a normal hole punch, so I just used an exacto knife.

Of course, these were so pretty, I had to keep a few for myself - I've one in my planner as part of my dashboard, and one as a bookmark (with some reindeer ribbon from my Christmas decoration supplies!).

So, I still needed some more gift tags. Luckily for me, as part of an Instagram photo challenge with the day's prompt of "stamps", I found an adorable Nutcraker-ish character stamp that I forgot I had stashed away.

And, of course, my stamping skills aren't 100% either, but the idea is there!

I stamped a bunch of this fella on printer paper, cut them out in mostly rectangles, and slapped 'em on presents!

It's not perfect (and neither is my handwriting!), but it's Christmasy and cute.

These, of course, could have turned into something much better, but as we're getting closer and closer to Christmas, I can't be the only one a bit craft-ed out!

Certainly makes me wish I had done this years ago!
Do you have fancy wrapping skills, or are you (like me) a normal sharpie-on-wrapping-paper kind of presenter?

~Havok