Embroidered Felt Gift tags

This was a great idea that I had to use up leftover felt from my Felt Gift Bags. These are green, reusable gift tags that I can embroider and monogram with the recipient's initials and then use it every year. I can ever color-code the embroidery floss by person (pink for mom, green for dad, purple for myself, etc.). What a great idea!

For this project, I needed strips of leftover felt (cream felt is best), embroidery floss in colors of choice, an embroidery needle, a hole punch and scissors.

To start, I needed tags. So, I took the scraps of leftover felt and cut a tag for a template, about 1.5 inches wide by 3.5 inches high. I simply took a scrap, folded it over and cut to those dimensions.

Once I had the first tags cut out, I used them as templates and cut out more to those dimensions.

Once I had a stack of tags, I had to give them a hole. I took a single hole punch, positioned it and punched a hole. It took a lot of strength (and it did hurt my hand) but I did make a hole. For a few of them, the punch didn't go through all of the way so I used scissors to cut the hole out.

Now that I had some tags with a hole, I got out the embroidery floss and a needle. I cut a length of floss and split it into three threads (it is usually wound with six).

I did a running stitch border around the edge with the embroidery floss and around the punched hole. I now have tags that look like this:

The back looks like this:

I didn't monogram these yet but I think that I will with the first initial of the recipient. I think that I will also color-code these so that each person has their favorite color. I can pick whatever style alphabet that I want for the letters and I am thinking of a nice, modern font.

Estimated time for this project: about 30 minutes for one. It doesn't take long to cut these out, but hole punching can be hard. The actual embroidery took about 20 minutes as I didn't do a quick running stitch -- it looked sloppy. I took the time to put the needle in and out.

Notes:

• I did the embroidery around the hole punch in the beginning as a detour then continued around the edges again. You can see that in the above picture. 

 Ideas:

• You can do this in your Christmas colors instead of color-coding it. 
• This would look excellent with a darker felt and lighter embroidery floss. 
• This is a fabulous idea for using up leftover pieces of felt. You can do it in any color with white embroidery floss.