DIY Brush Lettered Gift Bags

Our second freebie today is a tutorial from our Calligraphy & Brush Lettering course create by our contributor Claire who you can find over on her gorgeous Instagram account @claireyclaire (if you’re not following her you really should be!). She made us these brush lettered gift bags just in time for our Christmas kit, but really these are a beautiful way to give a gift any time of the year!

I’m sharing this with you to celebrate our new We Make Collective site launch and we’re giving away a new free tutorial from our courses section every day this week! (check out yesterdays here) I’m going to hand you over to Claire for the tutorial now. See you for the next freebie tomorrow!

Pen and ink calligraphy is fairly familiar to me, but I had never tried brush lettering so was really excited to give it a go. With the holidays round the corner it seemed fitting to create something festive. I am a die hard brown paper present wrapper, I use it every year, but this time I’ve given it a little twist and made brush-lettered gift bags.

To recreate these bags you’ll need the following in addition to your kit:

• brown paper
• glue

The first step is to make the bags. I used A3 sized sheets of paper, but any size will work.

1. Fold the short edges of the paper to the middle, over-lapping by an inch, gluing them together.
2. Fold the top layer upwards a few centimetres creating a triangle on each side. Crease these folds firmly.
3. Fold the top and bottom of the triangles inwards so that they overlap slightly.
4. Glue a rectangle of paper over the folds to secure everything in place. Flip the bag over and paint on the front.

Make sure you practice before painting directly onto your bag, play around with different consistencies of paint and different styles of writing. For example, I wrote ‘surprise’ quickly with quite watery paint, but used a thicker, dryer paint and a slower hand to write in uppercase. There are so many decorative elements you could add to your bags, leaves, snowballs and snowflakes are just a few.

Once your bag is decorated and dried, fill it with all sorts of goodies and holiday cheer, and make sure you treat yo self!