Artsy Floral Gift Bag Tutorial

Hello crafters, it’s Terri here, delighted to be back on the blog today with a tutorial for a fun and potentially free or extremely inexpensive make! Now who doesn’t love a freebie?! In this project, I used the “Artsy Floral” stamp set, which is one of the freebies available over in the Doodle Den. The florals are lovely to colour up and do very simple colouring with. For something a bit different, I decided to make a gift bag. If you’re a crafter like me, you likely have a die set to make gift bags with, or if not, you can pick up packs of about 10 plain white, craft, variety pack colours of inexpensive paper gift bags in pound/bargain shops for 1-2 pounds or dollars.

I made the gift bag using a die set from Simply Made Crafts, which is a brand exclusive to CraftStash (which has UK and US websites) and was extremely easy to put together. I chose to use ribbon for handles and used my crop-o-dile to set eyelets into the top of the bag, to give extra strength to it.

Firstly, I chose several of the floral stamps and resized them and copied and pasted them so I had a page full of cute florals to colour. Over the next few days I coloured up the majority of the florals in yellows and peach/orange, which I chose deliberately as they are complementary colours to the Denim Blue cardstock I used. I coloured these with my Copic alcohol markers, but you could use any colouring medium you like.

After colouring them all, I fussy cut the images out, leaving a thin white border. I don’t mind fussy cutting. I think the key is to have some good quality, sharp scissors, with comfortable grip handles. If your hands hurt when you’re fussy cutting, perhaps its best to invest in some better scissors!

Next came the fun part of figuring out how to display my beautiful little florals. I had lots of them, so decided that the front of the bag would have a cluster of blooms in each top corner and a die cut sentiment in the centre. I fussed around with the placement, getting it just right before adhering the blooms down with wet glue. I also cut one bloom in half and stuck it in the same position on the front and back of the top of the gift bag, between the handles.

I also wanted to decorate the back, and had a good few blooms left over. I arranged these into one large cluster and adhered it to the centre of the back of the bag.

I wanted to make the front a tad bit fancier, so as I had just had some new sequins and confetti in soft colours which worked perfectly with the colour scheme I had chosen, I arranged a scattering of these across the top half of the bag and adhered them with tiny dots of wet glue.

To finish off I added some small magnets to the inside of the bag, so it kept the centre of the landscape orientation bag closed – handy for hiding the contents and making it look more professional.

Here are some close ups of the bag to give you a closer look:

I really like the way this bag turned out and if I hadn’t hand coloured all of the images (which is time consuming but I enjoy it!) it would be an extremely quick make. So if you have a gift bag die that you haven’t got around to using yet, or see a pack of plain gift bags in the pound shop next time you’re there, why not give this project a go? If you use pre-coloured images and just cut them out, it will be a really nice quick make.

I’d love to know what you think of this project and if you’ll be giving it a go? If you do, don’t forget to let us know!  I’ll see you again very soon with some more crafty inspiration.

Happy crafting and see you again soon,
Terri/Veegstez Creates xxx

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