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What Was Old is New Again

kathleen3001
Dec 11, 2018
3 min read

I like vintage paper. I buy it at antique stores and thrift stores. When someone gives me some, I keep what is interesting. I store it all in a bin appropriately marked "Vintage paper." I saw some nice Christmas tags on Pinterest ((where else?) and set out to make some of my own.

I started with some tags I had on hand. I used blanks from Tim Holtz, called Ranger Mixed Media Tags. They are sturdy, for adding all kinds of things. Just what I needed.

First, I pulled out what I thought would be good vintage papers to use.

This is a page torn from an old cookbook - it was not in good enough shape to save. I kept several pages with interesting images.

Do you remember these? Ideals magazines started in the 1940's, I think, and are still published twice a year. I think it may have been more frequent in years past. The magazines are filled with poetry and stories, and GREAT old images. When I was a girl we had about four of these Christmas issues. They were not new ones, but every Christmas season they were around for us to enjoy. My sister and I poured over them; reading the poems and gazing at the images. A few years back, I came into the possession of several others. I had them all ready to be donated, and then I decided to keep them to use as papers in projects.

See? This page has excellent snowflakes.

Back to tag making...What I did next was to make the circles with "December 25" stamped on them, and to roll the edges in glue and glitter. You can use about any stamp set, but I was glad I had the word "December" on a Close To My Heart set. You just can't beat old fashioned glitter applied with glue, especially for vintage looking items.

Sometimes you may not want to cut up really cool vintage paper. In that case, do this - print images from the internet. I did that for the music images, and for these people.

I was looking for old fashioned photos of people in winter wear. These

kids are perfect.

I glued each of the people images onto some cardstock using a spray adhesive.

All of these items were left overnight to dry. I then cut the people out, and they were nice and sturdy. (Another option would be to print them on cardstock to begin with, but apparently I did not think of that. )

Next I brought down a bin I have in my craft closet labeled "Christmas Crafts." This is where I store little Christmasy things. Like these:

Now, to put it all together. First, there needs to be a base image.

These I cut from the Ideals magazines. The paper in these magazines is heavy, not like what we think of as magazine paper, so that was good.

I added some lace at the bottom using a basic craft glue.

Now, to match the cardboard people to the image on each tag.

I like this part - matching the images. Look at how this little boy is gazing up at the girl from long ago! They both played in the winter snow, but in very different times!

The tags then needed to be embellished. Bling Bling.