Decorated Recycled Tea Box Gift Tags

We love creating new things out of items that would typically get thrown in the recycling bin. In this case we made some sparkly, colorful gift tags from a empty tea box.

First we cut out the sides of the box:

This tea box was a Yogi Tea that decorates the inside of their boxes with detailed patterns. (Have a plain tea box? You could always draw your own designs! Don’t have a tea box? Use a piece of cardboard or card-stock instead!)

We colored one side of the squares with watercolor pencils and glitter glue:

Then we glued the cardboard to sparkly origami paper so that the back side would be pretty too:

After the glue dried, we cut out around the tags:

We then wrote recipient names (people from our immediate family) and placed each tag on a present under the tree:

We may end up mod podging the tags to preserve them so we can use them next year too. I love the idea of a recycled project that we will be able to reuse for years to come!