Wooden Reindeer Tags

As a change from what has seemed to be a very snowman dominated crafty Christmas,  I thought I would have a cheeky little experiment with reindeer instead.

I started by giving both sides of these 10cm x 5cm wooden dominoes pieces (below) two coats of brown emulsion paint.

Then I set out to create some antlers ………

…….. from small, 6.5 cms craft sticks. .

These were then painted, again on both sides with a darker shade of brown paint.

Although I didn’t do it in the example above, I found it best to put a screw eye hook at the top of the domino (to hang the finished tag from) before adding the antlers!  When the antlers were set firmly, I was then able to give the reindeer two coats of quick dry, clear, glossy varnish. 

This wasn’t absolutely necessary but I just find that varnishing often makes a tag look more professional as well as protecting the paint from chipping.

Then it was time to add the character to the reindeer starting with a bit of a fringe made from a scrap of brown paper, making a tiny fold to stick on the top of the reindeers head in front of the screw eye hook.

Next came the face using 18mm googly eyes, a red Fimo nose that I had made earlier.  I did wonder about a mouth, but to be honest, when I tried, it looked too much and sort of changed the character of the face, if you know what I mean. 

I thought I was finished at this stage giving the reindeer a collar using a piece of red and white gingham ribbon with a jingle bell attached ………

…… then I thought about adding some Christmas light trim (One Below £1)  to his antlers for comic effect. This was sooooooooooooo sooooooo fiddly, I hated every single moment. The final touches came from clusters of three white dots here and there using a fine tipped, white acrylic paint pen. Et voila!

I am pretty chuffed with how these have turned out. I have another 17 of this size domino that really need using up, so I am planning on getting them done before January is out, done and dusted ready for Christmas 2022 (??????). I must be mad  but with, perhaps, a little more fine tuning, I think the noses need to be quite a bit bigger than the eyes, which isn’t a problem and perhaps I could find some more durable scraps of leather for the fringe?  We shall see.