12 Tags of Christmas 2020 – Day 11 with Kelly Griglione

Welcome to Day 11 of 12 Tags of Christmas 2020!

Today we’re joined by Kelly Griglione, sharing loads of clever ideas inspired by “Deck the Halls.”

Be sure to leave a little love for Kelly – by commenting on this post – for a chance to win $25 to spend at ellenhutson.com, then click over to this post to enter the 12 Tags Challenge!

Hello Friends! It’s Kelly here to kick off Day 11 of our 12 Tags of Christmas with the carol “Deck the Halls.” When I picked this carol, I was thinking you could either:

1) be inspired by the title of the song and “deck” out your tags with pine branches, holly, berries, etc;

2) go for the verse and draw from the “Fa-la-la-la-la La-la-la-la.”

I took the latter approach and drew inspiration from all the “Fa-la-la-la-la La-la-la-la’s” in two different ways for my tags.

The first interpretation is quite literal, as you can see. I cut a tag with the Altenew Holiday Tag Die Set and then cut letters with the new Altenew Linear Pathway Alpha Die Set from several different colors of green cardstock. This is a great time to use your scraps!

Funny story: Originaly I only had three “La’s” on my tag, until I figured I better double check that. Even after singing it a few times I had to slow the song way down and count the actual “La’s” on my fingers. Wouldn’t you know … there are FOUR “La’s” hahahahaha

The second interpretation is to feature the actual caroler who sings the Fa-la-la’s. But I don’t have any caroler stamps. What to do?

Modify! I used the elf from Essentials by Ellen Holiday Characters (on the left) and made three easy changes to turn him into the caroler on the right:

1) made the ball on his hat larger so his hat isn’t as pointy (used the snowflake from Altenew Holiday Tag Sentiments);
2) cut his pointy elf ears down to size; and
3) connected the lines from his nose and smile to create an open-mouthed (singing) oval

Now we’ve got an honest-to-goodness caroler!

There are so many different sentiments that work with your new caroler. All the sentiments I’ve used for these tags, including this one, are from the Altenew Holiday Tag Die companion set, the Altenew Holiday Tag Sentiments. Love the mix of open font that you can color in, and the scripty font. I’ve used one of the tiny branch images to fill out the sentiment. The wonky circle background is from my favorite Essentials by Ellen Wonky Backdrops.

Any time I use a sentiment like “from all of us,” I feel compelled to represent everyone in our family. Naturally I had to make 4 more carolers. It took me awhile to figure out a pattern to color the stripes in their hat, but once I got a pattern I was happy with, I was able to repeat it for the other color families.

I didn’t have any musical stamps handy, and since I was being too lazy to go look for them, I just grabbed a felt-tip pen and drew in a few notes. Don’t always feel constrained by your stamps, you can always just fake it if you need to, especially for small and simple things like this.

I had two carolers left over from my hat-coloring attempts, so instead of tossing them, I cut another tag. This particular tag die set comes with several different edges for you to cut, like this zigzag. I think it’s a great place to add the sentiment. Often I like to cut a second tag with a coordinating pattern so I can write on that layer instead of the front of the tag.

This tag is a combination of interpretations … we’ve got two singing carolers WITH the Fa-la-la’s between them. Obviously I needed a much smaller set of alpha dies to fit them all, so I turned to the Essentials by Ellen Letterboard Dies (which are nice because not only do you get a set of dies, but you get the whole letterboard to put them on.)

One more leftover, the elf. All I needed to add for him were some presents and holly. I used the edge die to cut the tag itself shorter so the background shows through.