I have never made Magic Reindeer Food before, but, as I have seen it sneaking its way into the shops this year, so I thought I would have a go ….. trying to make it as simple and as economical as I could.
I decided that I would use some very old brown envelopes for the packaging, I have had them forever, but they had lost all their stick, but they were strong and would cost me nothing.
I then turned the said envelopes into bagalopes, there are lots of tutorials on the net on how to make them, the one I have linked to is really easy to follow.:- http://craftyjournal.com/basic-bagalope/. I didn’t do any fancy measuring, I just used my Coppernob score board, using the same line to score all the way round the envelope, after cutting off the flap and defuncked sticky stuff and cutting the edge with pinking shears.
For the food, I used mixture of “All Season” bird food (I kilo bag from Poundland), mixed with a few Jane Asher sugar stars and edible glitter also from Poundland (2 for £1), bagging it up in cello bags.
Then, I went back to the making some tags, which I decided to use “create” using Paint to “draw” a reindeer face, minus eyes and nose. I copied and pasted the design onto a tag, along with a poem that I also found on the net, but altered everso slightly to suit my needs.
From there, I made a PDF sheet of 10 tags on Dropbox that you are welcome to download and use https://www.dropbox.com/s/ften8bqz5cwaqxx/Magic%20Reindeer%20Food.pdf?dl=0
And now, you can see why I chose to miss out the nose and eyes, I knew googly eyes would give the reindeer character, as has his nose, which is a punched circle with a little white gel pen highlighting (like on the antlers). A scattering of small hologram stars and a few doodled dots here and there complete the tags. By leaving the tags relatively plain you can create lots of different reindeer characters and add other embellishments without too much hassle. 
With my original packing I used a green ribbon, but although I have miles of it (leftover from Tom and The Lovely Laura’s Rainbow Wedding), it did seem a tad extravagant, so decided to exchange it for a doubled up length of green gardening string ….. which somehow made it more rustic, natural reindeery feel , if you know what I mean. 
The tag also lacked a little something, so I mat and layered it onto scraps of red card, which not only made it stronger, but made the tag “pop”
Anyway, if you do download and use the basic tag, please, please, please send me photos of what you do with them, then I can write another post where we can all share our ideas if not for this but future Christmas’s.
This is such a cute idea. Wish I could try my hand at some, but I'm up to my eyeballs in other projects and not much time to finish them. Thanks for sharing the downloadable file!
ReplyDeleteHi Helen. Love your version of reindeer food, I have always used porridge oats and a sprinkle of glitter with a poem that we always used at Pre School(the oats disappear overnight just leaving the glitter which looks great) Our grand daughters loved sprinkling it outside last year fro the decorated cello bags I made up for them. This year I have little jars which I will add the "food" and poem to(got that idea from the ones that are in The Card Factory) I will try and send you photos (not too hot at that side of computing, sorry) Take care.
ReplyDeleteI did this last year for the charity at the shop where I work, ended up making about 75 of the little bags....kids loved them xx
ReplyDeleteGenius!!!! May I ask where all your wonderful crafty makes? Charities, friends and family?
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