Hand painted Christmas cards - Happy Christmas everyone!

Just a very quick one today to wish you all merry Christmas! I had an overwhelming response to the gift bag tutorial in my last post so I'd like to thank you all for popping by and your lovely comments :)

I can show you these watercolour Christmas cards I made as a commission now they've all reached their recipients! I've been keeping them under wraps for a couple of months.

The theme is 'ladies who lunch' and they are all individually designed and painted. The holly leaf background is drawn in gold pen. The paintings are slightly raised off the front of the card with sticky buds.

Hope you all have a fantastic Christmas, see you again on the other side!

Christmas gift bag tutorial

Are you feeling all festive? I've nearly finished my Christmas shopping! Just waiting for a few more bits and bobs to arrive in the post (thank you internet shopping!).

When it comes to wrapping up presents I always want them to look a little bit special. I've created this Christmas gift bag tutorial to help you make your presents look lovely too.

Start with a flat piece of wrapping paper. Fold the sides and top in about 1cm and glue.

Fold the sides in so that they meet in the middle. Secure with tape on the plain side of the paper, so that the tape can't be seen on the patterned side.

It should look like this.

Fold the bottom up about half as many centimetres as you want the base of the gift bag to be.

Then flatten the sides into triangle shapes like so.

Squash them down both sides so they're completely flat.

Fold the very bottom of the paper up to the middle of the triangles, do the same with the top of the flattened section.

Tape it down neatly.

Fold the right and left sides in to meet the points of the triangles created by the last folds.

Now open the bag out. It should be beginning to take shape.

You will need to inverse some of the creases to make it into a hollow box shape.

Push in the sides, fold in the bottom and flatten. This can be a bit tricky so just take it slowly.

Open out again and stand up. Cut a piece of card the size of the base and pop it in for a bit of added strength.

Now for the handles. Cut a narrow strip of paper, about 4cm wide and about as long as the width of the wrapping paper. Fold it in half all the way down the centre. It really helps if the pattern has stripes of some kind!

Now fold both sides of the strip inwards to meet the middle crease.

Fold in half again and glue together to form a narrow strip.

Cut the strip in half. It doesn't matter too much how long the two strips are as it will just make longer or shorter handles.

Fold the ends of each strip at right angles.

Stick to a strip of wrapping paper. As you can see, it doesn't matter if one side is longer than the other as it will be hidden.

Glue each handle to the inside of the bag.

And there you go! Don't they look pretty?

I've added a little origami bow to mine which I found on Pinterest. There's a fantastic tutorial for it here.

Good luck with your wrapping!

Merry Christmas everybody!

If you've enjoyed this Christmas gift bag tutorial, please follow my page for similar posts :)

Today I'm linking to the following blogs: Handmade Harbour, Knotted Cotton, Manon Popje's Illustrations, Be Different Act Normal and Tatertots and Jello.

Ballpoint pen drawings - Mum's sewing box

Deep in Christmas shopping, card writing and festive baking here so I only have a couple of drawings to share with you today and I'm cheating a little as the second one is only half finished!

They're both drawn with ballpoint pen. This one's A5 sized.

It's not really obvious here but this one is on cream A4 paper. It's drawn from a photo of an interesting fashion pin board which I found on Flickr. I still have the other half to do :)

Here are the mince pies that have also been keeping me busy!

Today I'm linking up to the following blogs: Lorik Art and Manon Popje's Illustrations