Gift Wrap Ideas # 4: Vintage Stamps

If you're attracted to the "brown paper packages tied up with string" look because you yearn for an old-fashioned Christmas, you can add an extra special retro feel to your parcels with some vintage stamps...

The simplest option, as always, is just to decorate your tags - you could use luggage tags or make your own like I did by sticking brown paper to scrap pieces of card:

 

 A single special stamp (I adore those little birds!) can be enough for a smaller parcel, but for larger tags try repeating the same stamp or using matching sets.

For some real crafty fun though, transform your plain brown paper package into a vintage-looking parcel:

 

Essential ingredients of this look are:
- lots of stamps, with added postmarks
- a piece of string, the older and more well used the better
- and a nice fake Agatha Christie style address written with a fountain pen. All your friends can be Lords, Ladies, Colonels, Majors, etc living in an assortment of invented English villages!

When you wrap your parcel, use double-sided tape if you can to give the illusion that it is the string alone which is holding your parcel together:

 

You can easily scale down this idea and make fake letter tags instead:

 

I used a small brown envelope with the flap glued down, but you could make your own using a small template like this one.

I'm a total stamp nerd so I had plenty of stamps on hand for this project, but you should be able to pick up a mixed bag of stamps pretty cheaply or you could just be very nice to any stamp collectors you know! (they usually have an abundance of Christmas stamps simply because of the sheer volume of Christmas cards people send).

Oh, and whatever you do don't try and actually post your parcels! Not without wrapping them in another layer and putting valid stamps on them first, anyway :)

Please feel free to borrow one or two photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to the original source, and do not reproduce my entire tutorial on your site. Thanks!

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