Gift Tags for Free

This might seem a teensie bit unseasonal at first glance - making Christmas Gift tags in January but bear with me, there is method in my madness!
Are you de-Christmassing your house about now? If so, this is when you need to be making next years gift tags.

When I was a kid we always made gift tags from last years cards. To be honest I thought everyone did, I must have been about 10 before I realised you could actually pay money for gift tags in the shops!
Back in the day my mum would give us the pinking shears, a pile of last years cards and let us get on with it. So our gift tags would look like this:

Nowadays I aim for something more like this:

As you take down your cards look for suitable one for re purposing. It's a bit sad but even as cards arrive in our house I am eyeing them up to see how I can reuse them later. 

These are the ones we had this year that I thought had most potential.

This is so easy I'm almost embarrassed to be explaining it. Just chop them up to make nice gift cards!

The easiest kind is the modern looking "all over design" style cards like this one.

All this needs is cutting into 4. I have a lovely little corner rounder which adds a nice finish, but it's ok to have square corners too! Then just punch a hole in the corner for ribbon with your normal, bog standard hole punch.

This type of card with a simple design or two is also ideal.

Just chop it in half, trim it so the images are more central and round the corners if you can.

Do watch the back of the cards, check them first before you get too far. I thought this mini card was ideal just as it was...

...until I saw the sellotape marks on the inside!

And this beautiful card with the stag was going great...

until I saw the print inside...

This one was ok in the end, just a slightly smaller tag than I had originally planned!

I made 18 tags from 8 cards in the end, completely free and taking about 15 minutes of my time.

I used to keep the whole card and make tags every December but it's actually much easier to make them now and just pop them in an envelope with any left over wrapping paper. They take up very little space, just don't forget you have them next December!

Here are 2014 presents, taken a couple of weeks ago. with tags I made last January. 

Do you reuse old cards for anything, find a way to save them from just going straight into the bin?

You might also be interested in:

Pillow Pouch from cardboard tube

Recycled Business Cards

Washi Tape Berry Boxes

Recycled Gift Wrap Ideas

I'll be linking up this project at all these lovely link parties, pop over for a look at loads of projects from other blogs