Gift Bag Upscale Tweak

Gift Bag Upscale 

Who doesn't love pretty wrapping? You may as well use the same energy making it personalized.

Let's just admit it, when we purchase these bags for the correct size the theme is not quite spot on, especially if we're shopping Dollar Tree.

So in 30 minutes, this gift bag went from wrong theme ordinary, to personalized, gift filled matching tissue paper and completed. Yes 30 minutes, it's worth it.

Where To Start

Grab your gift bag, this one is a Dollar Tree Baby Gift Bag. Grab any color ideas you will be working with. You can do that by pulling a color from the bag you are working with or your recipients favorite colors. Here I am working with Silhouette Glitter Vinyl, and as we all know glitter goes with everything, lol. Gloss vinyl also works well on gift bags. Heavy Cardstock is another idea. Do not forget all the lovely stickers at Dollar Tree if you do not have a craft cutting machine. 

Measure the portion that needs covered, get creative.
This bag has letters that are 1 inch wide and 1 1/2 inches tall. It would be very tricky to cover these letters, with just letters, so adding an outline made it possible to cover that space. Don't know how to add outlines, check out this post on my Silhouette Blog.

I just happen to love adding extras with hearts or stars, but in this case the bag already had hearts, so I went with the theme.

I do not like to waste much product so that's really how I make my final decisions on the 'extra' bling. I typed out the name on my 12x12 Silhouette Studio mat. Resized as I needed it, seen how big of a piece of vinyl I needed to cut these letters. Then in my extra space I just cut out a bunch of hearts. When I setup the white to cut I decided to add my favorite Happy Birthday cut out, then added a few more hearts slightly larger than the pink ones.

On this bag the glitter vinyl was repositionable so I just sort of played with it a bit until I had a look I liked. When using regular vinyl use low tack transfer or prep your transfer so it is low tack or it can stick to your gift bag. (DO NOT put transfer on vinyl you are sticking to tissue paper.) Cutting your shapes and letters out individually with very little background will give you the ability to mock up your look before committing and sticking it down. Remember when sticking glitter vinyl to glitter vinyl add some kind of extra adhesive.

I could have just admired my 20 minute success and moved on, but why stop now? That sad looking 'yellow' handle had to go. Cut and remove.

Rummage your ribbon stash, find something that accents your now upscaled gift bag.

There are dozens of ways to replace these ribbon handles that will remain steady. The one I chose to do here was to just loop it through and tie it to itself on the inside. If it's a thick ribbon you could tie it in a knot on the inside, or if you love your glue gun you can hot glue it. To measure for handles place the old one next to your new ribbon and add the span you'll need for it to tie to itself, cut. Then cut your second one the same size.

Add leftover hearts to tissue paper. NOTE: If stamping tissue paper to match you will want to add your stamp to each corner of the tissue paper before inserting. When adding vinyl to personalize your tissue paper, simply add your tissue paper then 'sprinkle' stick vinyl as you like.

The Pink and White Glitter Vinyl is from the Silhouette America website in the vinyl section.