Tag time!

Christmas has come and gone, and for the past two days I have been studiously taking down lights, decorations, ivy and trees, putting them away for the next 11 months.

But inevitably, the Christmas clean-up reveals the papery and glittery detritus of the season, with wrapping paper, shreds of Christmas crackers and a hoard of Christmas cards left over.

I say left over, because in our house, we keep everything we can in order to reuse and repurpose. One of the things I like to do is to salvage decent leftover papers and ribbons to save money on gift tags.

Christmas cards can be cut up into several decent tags for gifts; I don't mean simply snipping and sticking with a piece of sellotape; oh no, in our house, the Mermaid makes the most of everything to make the tags as pretty as possible.

Using a hole punch, ribbons from used Christmas crackers and a corner trimming punch, you can create some rather pretty recycled tags.

Here's a sample of my card haul! 

Ribbons from Christmas crackers

A cracking lot of ribbons!

I simply punch one hole in the top of the tag when I've cut it into shape, feed through one of these ribbons (which are too bent and twisted from being on a cracker for so long to be useful for anything else), tie it up and trim the corners with a corner rounder punch.

The corner punch I have is very similar to this one (but very old now!) and it is great for rounding up the corners and hiding any uneven edges:

Corner rounder for paper crafting

Et Voila! Some very easy but highly cost- and environmentally efficient tags, ready for next year!

Hand-made gift tags

If that really does seem like too much hassle, and you do not particularly enjoy card craft or paper crafting, or even if you do not tend to send or receive Christmas cards, then I would urge you to get down to your local supermarket as soon as possible to get a bargain before the sales end and all the shelves are replete with Valentines' Day and Easter fare! 

For example, from Sainsburys I picked up a 4m roll of Christmas wrapping paper for 50p, and packs of gift tags for just 10p each. The original price of the wrapping paper had been £2.00 and the tags had been 50p per pack. Happy days! 

Bargains from Sainsburys

Of course, you may like to hoard all your cards - but eventually space will be needed and it is so much better to reuse in a systematic and fun crafting way, rather than having to throw cards en masse into the recycling when you just haven't got any more room to store them.


And then there are some cards, like this one from my crafting queen friend Jan, are just far too excellent to carve up!

Nodding Kitty:

Card craft extraordinaire!  A Nodding Cat Christmas Card!

CAVEAT:
In the desire to save money and the environment, I would advocate refraining from blithely cutting up all of your most recent Christmas cards from December 2016 ready for December 2017. 

Many years ago when I started to repurpose old cards, I discovered that I'd cut up the last ever card someone I cared about gave me, for they died that year.

Therefore, I save my cards so that I will be using December 2015 and corporate cards delivered to the office for December 2017's gift tags, just in case I have to say farewell to any dear family and friends this year and regret not having a card from them as a memento.

Wedding Anniversary: Paper

Wedding anniversary celebrations, disclosed to the world on Facebook, have always annoyed me slightly. Given so many of my friends are single or divorced, having other smug married friends rub it into their faces with outpourings of emotion over their soulmates is a little mawkish, in my view.

That said, Mr Mermaid and I do love to celebrate our wedding anniversary (and keep it on the down-low). True, we have been married just three years but it is fun to mark the anniversary of the day we both became tax-incentivised adults with the full legal and financial – I mean, the day we celebrated our love publicly in the honourable institution of marriage. Ahem.

Apart from the smug satisfaction of having outlasted the Kardashians in their various marital endeavours, it is good to be able to use the nearest weekend as an excuse to get away from everything and everyone else and focus on our gratitude to God and each other.

That said, finding appropriate gifts can sometimes be problematic. If one follows the traditional rules around giving - paper, cotton, leather, etc, then getting something good for a reasonable price is not easy. Correction: it is easier for men to buy for women than the other way around.

For our first year, paper, I wanted to get Mr Mermaid some bespoke, quality stationery. I explored some of the high-end options from boutiques he appreciates, such as Smythson, Aspinall and Liberty.

But the price tags for what I wanted were phenomenal. No discounts - and a starting price of at least £100. By the time all the bespokery (is there such a word? There is now) would have been completed, I would be looking at a bill of nearly £300.

Now I love my husband greatly but there is no way I would spend £300 on paper. The very idea was ridiculous. Notwithstanding the fact we had just got married and were, therefore, broke, I have always laboured under the principle that if you can feasibly make something yourself, then do not pay for it. I am a card crafter. I am artistic. Therefore branching out into stationery did not seem too high a leap for me.

Cue Amazon. I had seen in various high-end stores boxes of luxury cards from a certain company, retailing for about £40 for blank notelet cards (not folded). I figured I could get the same blank cards for less on Amazon. I did. 50 cream Crown Mill luxury cards with matching lined envelopes, for £26.99 plus P&P. 

Crown Mill laid paper in Cream

I also bought one tiny wooden-handled rubber stamper of a star, and a square inkpad in military green. On a different site I paid just under £5 for a personalised black-ink stamp with my husband’s details on it. A few day later, all my materials had arrived - for less than £50.

It took a few practice runs on scrap paper to get the right pressure and, having carefully marked in faint pencil straight lines on each card front, created a bespoke set of stationery that looked professional, felt professional and cost barely anything. I have had to remove our address from the below, of course.. so you can only get a rough idea of how nice this looked. 

What's inside the box? Personalised Stationery, of course!

As I had some money left over from my original budget of £70 for gifts for George, I meandered to my local picture framing store, which has won many awards for its creative framing. I spent £24 getting five hearts cut out of the stiff card by their laser cutter (I got to keep the bits of heart-shaped card), and printed out in colour five Google maps: where we both grew up, where we met, where we married, where we live (this bit was free).

Wedding Anniversary gift idea: personalised maps

This now adorns my husband's study wall, and he loved his stationery. And all for a bargain, whereas if I had opted for ordering all these things from another artisan, I could have spent between 300-400 smackers.

So I am now in the business of making bespoke stationery, as well as cards and jewellery! Oh and with those cut-out hearts, I made several Valentine's Day cards in various styles, which I sold for approximately £2 each.

Perfect Party Planning for January... on a budget!

Several of my friends are having birthdays or having to attend post-Christmas children's parties ("Let it Goooo, Let it Goooooo") in January and early February - just at the tightest financial time of the year. Of course this lends itself to a fiscal dilemma - trying to make the special day special without breaking the bank.

The other year, we threw a surprise party for a friend's daughter who was 21. Being a steampunk aficionado, we spent an evening working out ways to design and create a themed party for her, while keeping a tight budget. The idea was to have as much as possible for as little as possible - I think the whole party, food included, was meant to be under £100.

The results were amazing, and only involved a little paper, cardboard tubes, glass jars, scissors, twine, glue and good old-fashioned grit. Oh, and a lot of imagination and gold paint spray.

The following tips are perfect for any celebration, especially for a money-saving New Year party.

1) Bunting
To decorate a wall or garden, bunting is ideal as it takes up a lot of space and can transform a plain wall into a perfect party room.

How to
Rather than throw out old cotton or linen sheets, wash them, and cut out small triangles of equal size. Take some soft twine or strong wool, and attach each triangle to the twine, allowing a couple of inches space between each triangle. To attach, simply fold a little bit of the cloth over the twine and either staple or do a running stitch. Alternating colours of cloth makes for a pretty pattern.

2) Teasing tea-lights
Baby food jars can make great ornaments, especially if you want to light up your garden. Tying 20 or so to a tree and filling the garden with twinkling tea lights is a wonderful touch, or dot them around
staircases or mantelpieces to add a bit of seasonal sparkle.

Go home Lantern, you're drunk

Right-side Up

You will need:
Baby food jars
Some thin but strong wire - jewellery wire or picture wire
Some natural foliage from the garden
Some battery-operated tealights

How to:
Clean as many baby food jars as you can. Put a tiny layer of leafage at the bottom of the jar. Use the wire to create a little 'basket handle' around the lip of the jar. Make it as high and hooped as possible. Cover any unsightly knots and ties around the jar with a little (non prickly) foliage. Test the tealight and make sure it can sit reasonably straight on the foliage. Otherwise it gets drunk and falls over, like the wee lantern on the left...

3) Lovely labels
Make food more inviting by creating themed mini menu cards to stick into dishes and sit alongside cakes.

How to:
Print out some coloured paper to match your bunting / colour theme.
Many crafting website offer free print-outs of party paper in myriad colours and patterns, and fix onto a sheet of card.
Any card will do; empty boxes or Christmas cards are perfect, as it helps to recycle and clear up after Christmas.
Choose whichever shape suits you and make a template to trace around as many as you need.
Take a nice pen; gold or silver or black make stand-out descriptions. When the ink dries, use a little sellotape to stick toothpicks onto the back of the card and use to adorn your table.

4) Paper chains get perky
A great way to use up leftover paper is in the making of paper chains.
Whether you use coloured paper, newspaper or shiny metallic paper, the outcome can look swell. We used old photocopied sheet music, copied onto some cream-coloured paper I had leftover from my wedding craft box. The effect was striking.

How to:
Choose your paper scheme cut into even strips
Glue or use double-sided tape on one end and hoop each strip through to complete a chain.

And why stop at chains? We also traced some cogs of different size onto cardboard, traced onto metallic coloured card and created a string of brass-shimmery cogs, fastened with metal paper fasteners.

5) Paper roses
I made roses out of an old, battered version of my favourite book and a copy of the Financial Times - where I met my husband - for my wedding bouquet, and for my bridesmaids.

This was the FIRST time I had ever made the roses - and the FIRST time I had ever done ANY flower arranging. So I guess it was a success!

Me with my bouquet getting ready 

One of my bridesmaid's bouquets

In addition to being lovely wedding bouquets that really will last forever (and cost next-to-nothing to make), I have given out single ones and smaller arrangements. These make magnificent gifts for individuals and a wonderful ornament for the dining table if you are having a family meal or dinner with friends.

Unique and budget wedding or party decoration

You will need
Some 16- gauge green florists' wire
Paper - lots of it
A glue gun
Some thin jewellery wire
Some sparkly beads from broken necklaces
Any stick-on sparkles

How to
These will take time but I PROMISE they will look amazing.
Cut five sizes of petal. The smallest should be as small as the tip of your index finger, the next a little larger, the next larger still and so on until you have some large and broad petals.
Imagine a rose and shape each of your cut out books or coloured paper like a real petal. Slightly curl the tips of the two larger size petals to make them resemble real rose petals.
Start with twisting a small bead onto a piece of wire, and wrapping it around the top of the florist's wire. Imagine this as the stamen of the rose.
Then start to wrap the smallest petals around the wire, using a little hot glue at the bottom of each one to fix it. Use five of each size for each rose.
Start on the second size petals, fixing them around with glue on the bottom of each one, slightly overlapping each one.

By the time you get to the third layer it will start to look like a rose bud. On the last layer, you will need to cut a little bit into the bottom of the petal so that it can wrap around the bottom of the rose better. You can start to shape the petals a little when it is formed. Use a little ribbon or green tissue paper to cover up the messy base of the flower, cutting it like the sepals of a real rose.

It takes about 40 minutes. So it does take time, but these roses last forever. And if you want to go the extra mile, try making these bespoke - perhaps out of photocopies of someone's favourite poems or book. I suggest using a COPY of their favourite book... don't just chop up their limited edition signed by Margaret Atwood. Just a suggestion...