Coffee-Tags Tutorial

Hello everyone:)

 It's me, Elin, with some new ideas for you. This week we are playing with brown and can you think of anything more brown than coffee? I find myself using tags for almost all of my projects, but almost everytime I'm about to use one I find it too white for my project. As you all know, the vintage style is all about the "old look", so I figured some coffee would do the trick.

So here's what you need to make coffee-tags at home:

Some sort of plastic container to put everything in, powder coffee (doesn't have to be an expensive one), the tags you want to colour, an old newspaper to spill on and some hot water.

The first thing I do is to fill up the container with hot water and then I sprinkle on some coffee powder. The amount of coffee depends on how deep colour you want on your tags. You can also adjust this with the time you leave the tags in the coffee bath.

Then you put all your tags in the bath; you can colour quite a lot of them at the same time. If they tend to float up, I use a fork or a knife to push them down again.
And now we wait...

I usually leave them over night, but then again it comes down to what colour you are after.
Check them every now and then, and take them out when satisfied.

This is my result when I pull them out. While still wet, I sprinkle some coffee powder over them to get the "stained look". When they are dry, the colour has faded a bit and they don't look this intense anymore.

And here they are, all dried up and ready.
If they are very curly when they have dried, you can pull out your iron and flatten them on high temperature.

Now what's left is the fun part; decorating!
Here are a few simple ideas on how to decorate:

For the tag above I only used stamps. It is the backside of the tags below, which I'll attach to wine bottles for two of my girlfriends ;)

For the front I used the stunning papers from Riddersholm Design: Mill Truck from the Fleamarket Collection and Songbird from the Huntington Garden Collection. The mini tags are from the Fleamarket and Huntington cut out sheets. I stamped my papers with this gorgeus vintage stamp from Inkido, called Carte Postale.

 Other than the papers, I also used heart brads, memo pins, a painted Love Hanger, some Cheese cloth and natural jute fabric.

For my bows, I used Shabby Seam Bindings; these colours are "Sky Blue" and "English Lavender". Combined with the natural Jute Twine, it completed my task for this week :)

Hope you enjoyed my tutorial and got some ideas from this.

With Love