I have a love hate relationship with wrapping presents. For some reason, I have a hard time getting the wrapping paper to fold properly and look nice and neat.
Because of this, I love gift bags. No worrying about wrapping a weirdly shaped item, just put the present in there and cover it with tissue paper. It’s also much less mess to clean up and I like that they’re reusable for multiple holidays and fold flat for easy storage.

Rather than buying some already decorated gift bags and tags, I found some plain brown lunch style paper bags in one of my boxes of supplies and decided to do what I generally do and decorate it myself.

Well, not completely myself.

I’m good at a great many things, but I know my limits and drawing is not one of the things I am good at.

Luckily for me, my 13 year old younger sister is (very) good at drawing. I asked her if she would design and paint a bag for me to put our mom’s present in. She enthusiastically said yes.

I gave her the bag and told her she had carte blanche with the design. While she started on the bag, I started working on the gift tag.

Yes, I could have done the tag in Word and printed it out, but where would be the fun in that?

Also, I couldn’t go that route because my primary computer crashed and died and my printer decided to be a major pain, I ended up doing it by hand. Today I’m going to share the method I used to make these.

These tags can be made for so many occasions just by changing up the colors.

You will need:

• Cardstock paper
• Ruler
• No. 2 pencil
• Scissors
• a 1.00 mm crochet hook
• Sewing thread

With a ruler and a no. 2 pencil measure a rectangle measuring 3 inches wide by 1.75 inches tall onto a sheet of cardstock paper. Repeat to make as many tags as you want / need.

Cut the tags out with a pair of scissors. I also rounded the corners to reduce the paper cut risk.

Next, I took the thread out of my sewing machine and with a standard presser foot, started piercing the paper 1/4 inch away from the edge on all four sides. This creates an even line of holes for the next step.

Select your sewing thread color. I’m using a mini spool of polyester thread in Ice Blue. Make a slip knot and join your thread into one of the holes on the long side. Re

Rnd 1: Single crochet in each hole around, placing 2 stitches in each of the corner stitches, being careful to not excessively bend the paper. Join with a slip stitch to the first stitch.

At this point you could just fasten off ad weave in the ends, but I wanted to make it slightly more fancy, since it was for my mom after all!

To make it slightly more fancy, I added a simple picot border to the tag.

Round 2: Ch 3, single crochet in the first chain, skip a border stitch and then single crochet in the next stitch. Repeat from *to* around, joining with a slip stitch to the first stitch.

Fasten off and weave in the ends on the wrong side of the tag under the stitches from Round 1.

I set my iron to the polyester setting and lightly pressed the tag to remove any slight wrinkles that occurred as a result of being handled.

At this point, I handed it off to my sister to design the lettering.

First, with a mechanical pencil she lightly sketched out the letters, and then filled them in with a fine paint brush and black acrylic paint.

The bag also turned out beautifully. After sketching the lettering out like she did for the tag, she sketched out snowflakes. She even made every one of them different!

After she was done sketching everything out, she then outlined and filled in the letters with black acrylic paint and then painted over the snowflakes with white acrylic paint.

The first time I saw it was after she’d painted the letters and was in the middle of painting the snowflakes. I thought it couldn’t get any better but then when I saw it a little while later, she’d made it look even better! After the snowflakes were added, she added dots of falling snow all over the bag to complete the look.

After it was dry, I put the gift for my mom in it and topped it with blue tissue paper and then set the tag on top of the bag since the bag didn’t have handles to tie the tag to.

I loved collaborating with my sister on this project and I can’t wait for our mom to see it!
Are you team bag or team wrapping paper? Let me know in the comments what your favorite method of gift concealment is!