Happy Thanksgiving and a Super-Simple Christmas Tag Tutorial

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers. Today is one of my favorite days of the year and I wish the spirit of gratitude and appreciation for blessings we feel today would live as strongly all year long. I'm so grateful to each and every one of you who takes the time to read my maunderings and special thanks to those of you who comment, either here on the site or in emails. Y'all keep me going.

For today, I wanted to share a super-simple tutorial for making a large number of small tags quickly. As I say every year, our family likes to acknowledge all the many people who help with our children...the aides, therapists, special education teachers, regular teachers, and others. When you have a child with special needs, you cannot raise them alone...all these professionals make a HUGE difference in your child's life.

Grateful doesn't begin to cover it.

The sheer numbers of these special people in our lives are overwhelming at the holidays, especially this year when our personal lives are so chaotic with the house sale. In years past, I've made card sets for them, but this year, I knew that would not be do-able. The kids enjoy making these sugar plums every year, so I decided we'd just acknowledge each special person with a sugar plum this Christmas and then do something extra-special at the end of the year, when we will be moved and have more time.

Our sugar plums this year will have white candy coating; red, white, and green sprinkles; and white candy sticks (rather than craft sticks shown on the Family Fun website). Over the years, I discovered that tying curly ribbon or such around about a hundred sugar plums is BORING, so last year, I used red pipe cleaners cut to size with a single jingle bell threaded onto them. (Pictures of ours this year will be forthcoming....)

I've never attached tags to the sugar plums before. We've always just handed them out to the boys' friends and to neighbors. But for the teachers and therapists, I wanted to have a simple tag to attach to the pipe cleaner. The boys can put their names on the backs of the tags for a bit of personalization.

These stickers, found on sale at Michael's a few weeks ago, are the perfect adornment for my mass-produced tags. They even already have a little spot of bling! Y'all know I hardly ever use stickers or other prepared embellishments on my projects, but these seemed too cute to pass up.

I used my tag punch to make 24 tags out of Papertrey Ink's stamper's select white cardstock (nice and thick).

After afixing the stickers to each tag, I used a 1/8" hole punch and craft floss to finish the tags.

Here's the finished product. So easy, so cute, so FAST. The pipe cleaner can be threaded through the floss loops for easy assembly when the sugar plums are packaged.

The lesson of today's tutorial is that if you use the right products, mass production of simple tags can be incredibly easy and so fast that it hardly gets boring at all.