Embroidered Gift Tags

I usually make some kind of gift tag for Christmas presents. In 2017, I made these since I was embroidering everything else in sight.

The wooden hoops are from HMCrafters on Etsy. I appreciated these because they were a very good price. Hoops can be up to $7 each or more elsewhere (others may have different designs possibly including little metal tension screws), but in this shop they are $1.45 – $1.85 each. The ones I got range from 1 inch to 2 inches in diameter. They have a wooden insert that you glue fabric to and then a felt piece to glue to the back.

The fabric I used is a charm pack of batiks from fabric.com. A charm pack is a collection of 5″ square cuts of different fabric from a collection, and batik is a type of fabric where patterns are created using a resist substance like wax during dyeing.

I used the font Ribeye Marrow (a free Google font) and just typed out the names/letters on my tablet, placed the fabric over the screen, and traced the letters with a water-soluble fabric pen. The fabric was thin enough to see through with the screen light. I may have also used my phone.

Then I embroidered over the lines using backstitch or stem stitch. After doing one, I realized you could see the thread color and raised texture from the front, so I started putting some stabilizer on the back to mask that. Of course, then gluing became more complicated with 2 layers of fabric, but I think the glue kind of soaked through the stabilizer so it worked out ok. I used this 3M glue that has kind of like a sponge on one end and a point on the other. I don’t know why I felt it was necessary to use that. I think the “sponge” was appealing for covering an area.

I tied them on gift bags with ribbon and they were good to go!