Fab-BOO-lous Owl Giftbags

Fab-BOO-lous, dahlink!

Take a look at these gift bags – they are so fab-boo-lous that even the zombies want them!

Do you like the spooky overlays on the picture? They are Pixlr overlays and are available to spook-up your boo-tiful halloween photos for FREE! Go to Pixlr.com to try them out. I have used an overlay (the zombie hand) and a “veil” (which gives the blood drops and the red mist) on this image. There are tons to choose from – go on and have a play!

All of the shapes here come from the fabulous (I will give you a rest from the Boos for a minute!) Howl-o-ween Treat stamp set and co-ordinating Boo to You dies. They are so easy to use – you just stamp and cut. I was able to make 6 of these cute gift bags in an evening, along with a couple of other cards which I have stored away to share with you as well. (You can see a sneaky peek of some of the bits I used in the picture below!)

I have used Very Vanilla to create the base bags, but you can just as easily use Whisper White, or Extra Thick Whisper White or DSP… you get the idea! If you want some added texture effects, then Gorgeous Grunge is a great stamp set for adding a little extra interest to your backgrounds.

I was having a little trouble with my black ink pad, so that explains why some of my owls are black and some are grey – I switched it up half way through!

Obviously, the little bags had to *hold* something – I used little bags of Haribo sweeties which I had left over from my team training swaps so they were perfect. I had 5 bags left – which is exactly how many I needed for the 5 people in my team at work! There are 6 of us, but I didn’t need to give myself sweeties (I do more than enough of that as it is!) 😉

I ended up with 3 black owls and 3 grey owls. Don’t they look cute together? Here’s one of each:

And the black guy close-up:

And here is the baby grey owl:

I love the boo die cuts! These gift bags were really easy to make as they are just dies and a few stamped images. The hats and pumpkin bags are popped up on Stampin Dimensionals and the boo and the owl are stuck flat onto the bag itself. I stuck the owl with multipurpose glue (aka tombow!), and the boo with the new fine tip glue pen. That is a great bit of kit, just make sure you use it sparingly or it easily squidges out everywhere – you don’t want that kind of trick on your treat bags!

Here’s a non-doctored version of that spooky picture from bove:

Although the pumpkin bags look yellow, they are actually stamped in Pumpkin Pie! I am thinking I may need to invest in a darker orange colour for my halloween and autumnal projects 😉

I made 6 of these bags with the intention of having one for myself, and then the twins found them in the morning as they were on my table downstairs and they immediately wanted them. As I only had 1 spare I had to say no, which made one say a sad little “okay” and the other cry! But I promised to make them a treat bag in the evening, which I duly did for them. They didn’t want owls, though, or boo die cuts, they wanted princesses (which I couldn’t easily do) and then dinosaurs (which I did)! I took the “spare” bag to work to put on my desk, then showed it to one of the other guys who loved it so much, even without sweets in it, that I let him have it for his desk!! I am such a generous being 😉

So that’s my halloween-y share, sorry it’s a little late, but maybe it will help you come up with some Christmassy ideas? I’m thinking if you cut the witches hat in red without stamping it, put a white pompom on the top and some fluff at the bottom it would make a great Santa hat? I will have to try that out. Then I can have Santa owls! My sister-in-law would *adore* that, as she loves owls.

Tomorrow I have a mix of halloween and Christmas, as I aim to share the swaps that Hilary made for our team training last weekend. I managed to get a pic of all her swaps together before she swapped them. 🙂 So come back tomorrow to see those.