LABELS AND ENVELOPES : how to make and embellish them…

Labels and envelopes are a good way to agreeably decorate your scrapbooking pages, your greetings cards or your mini album. They will be the agents for your small secrecies or your hidden treasures !

Envelopes

They will contain a dissimulated memory : a cinema ticket associated with a strong memory, a masked photograph to discover, a small object “reminder” that you're attached, a small piece of wedding veil or or lace…

So you've many opportunities to stage all these little treasures to make decorations in their own right and thus provide them with the necessary embellishments. They will also be used as support for matting the photographs, you will can use them to make a mini-album…

The labels (tags)

They are not only ideal for the journaling but also for the decoration of your page !

You will do them same by printing boards freebies, you will decorate them with all the possible embellishments, you will decorate them doodeling with coloured felt-tips… You will be able, of course, to also buy them all ready in your favorite stores…

Very often associated with the ribbons, the labels are an element impossible to circumvent of American scrap… which appear even sometimes in the more austere European scrap.

The forms extremely diversified : from the “stupid” luggage tag of the beginnings provided with its eyelet and its bond of fastener out of fiber we passed to design and more elaborate colors. Certain scrapbookers specialized in the making of labels of all kinds!

How to make yourself your envelopes 

To obtain an envelope gauge… it is enough for you “to dismount” by separating it carefully, a commercial envelope which is appropriate to you… then to defer the form thus created on the paper of your choice. Some points of adhesive "acid free" and you obtain your envelopes.

Fabricating all parts of an envelope is really not difficult! Of course, with a gauge it's simpler… but it is limited at the same time more: you do not control dimensions. Thus learn how to make you even your gauges of cutting!

Let us give dimensions… for example : an envelope to slip a photograph 10x15… Envisage a light play of 1cm in all directions, one obtains 11x16.

Draw the “plan” of your envelope, defer the dimensions there… You must to have bottom, principal flap (that which closes the envelope), a large basic flap and two flaps on each sideside…

When your diagram is ready, it any more but does not remain to build this envelope, full-scale, on a thick paper clearly or sharp color or in Kraft, rather elegant.

Trace with the full-scale rule. Cut out the form. A little adhesive on the flaps on side, you fold back the basic flap… and it is finished, now remains to decorate the envelope with your suitability.

Making your envelope gauge

If you have several envelopes to realize, trace the full-scale envelope, on a light paperboard. Cut out this paperboard with cutter or scissors : it will be used to you as gauge to trace all the following ones.

Other models of envelopes

Always around the same diagram, for those which like the round-offs: an envelope all in curves.

For an envelope measuring 9cm on 6 finished : trace the basic rectangle with dimensions. Mark the mediums of each side of the bottom then trace the half-circles centered on these mediums (look on the diagram, it is clearer!).

Cut out the form, paste the flaps on side and fold back the basic flap… your envelope is completed.

Vary the shapes of your envelopes!

SI you want to slip your journaling-labels into an envelope, adapt the size of this one to that of the tag… calculations are not quite complicated!

Here the plan of an envelope “longitudinally” for a tag measuring 7cm on 10. I chose an envelope whose bottom measures 11x8 (1cm moreover in all directions).

Decorate and embellish the envelope thus obtained by sticking a piece of lace to it, a button, a letter as on the photograph below.

Slip your tag journaling inside after having attached it with a small ribbon slipped into the eyelet.

For the envelope of the photograph below, it is the same plan as that drawn higher, other than the semi circular flap which closes the envelope). This one then received embellishments to be integrated into a scrap page.

Gauges to resize and test…

GABARIT1, GABARIT2

Some sites where to download labels…

Launch a research on Google or Yahoo… with like words key: tags, labels, envelopes scrapbooking… then made sorting!

I liked: http://www.mardarsprintables.com with a choice very important of tags to be printed!
You will also find there a choice imposing of envelopes to be printed and cut out: http://www.mardarsprintables.com/cardsandenvelopes.htm
more still of papers, the embellishments… The site is in perfectly comprehensible English but with the little of vocabulary I have!

Come to see on gauchoGirl, fribiz, scrapK and creations of Anne Cath the new labels in remote loading!

Also go on the SCRAP OF SYLVIE where many gauges of envelope or labels journaling await you.

Don't forget KARIART'S CREATIONS... a must !

And still….

And for those which miss times or which do not like to arrange paper (that would astonish me !), there are the done everything envelopes, to buy directly in the trade-shops…

Initially, a permanent mine of articles of scrapbookingt and at rather advantageous prices if you can select the advertisements: ebay envelopes and still ebay labels offer many possibilities to you.

Generally, I always seek on ebay before seeking on the trader sites! After there remains TOGA, GlobalGift, American Craft… and all the others…

Nevertheless all these marks propose to you a complete range for your favorite activity. But attention, with the pleasure of buying, the invoice can quickly appear very, VERY, VERY "salted" !!!

Good scrap!

Books about making envelopes...

Pushing The Envelope:
Crafty Packaging
for Cards of All Kinds
Marthe Le Van (Author)

There are plenty of books on making greeting cards, but few pay attention to the envelope that holds the missive...

Quick, mostly easy, and very clever, the ideas make the most of plain old paper...

The Envelope Mill:
Recycle Magazines
into Beautifully Crafted
Envelopes/Book
and Templates
Haila Harvey (Author)

Creative and practical : The whole book is valuable. The templates are very useable.

A very useful book !