Easy Gift Card Holders

As Christmas gifts, since we usually end up having to travel in a car with our dogs and our luggage and several gifts, it has become easier to resort to giving the impersonal gift cards. Oh well. So, as an effort to make it a bit more personal, I decided to make my own gift card holder. :-) Anyway, I found this site that showed how to make Easy Peasy Snap Wallets and basically used the same technique with Christmas fabric and called them giftcard holders.


Here's how I did it:
Materials:

• fabric (in this case Christmas... but can easily be for a birthday or any other occasion)

• interfacing (I don't know if this is really necessary, but it does make it slightly thicker to have)

• easy no sew snaps (trust me, these are the way to go if you are a beginner to sewing – super easy to use.)

*Please note that I started making one wallet with one fabric then decided to use another fabric afterwards because the details showed better on it. Sorry if that makes it confusing.

Instructions:

1. Cut your fabric. You need two rectangles that are about 5 x 8.5 (I cut out a piece of paper to that shape as a guide.... and yes, TigerDirect.com is pretty awesome).


2. Cut your interfacing. You just need one rectangle of this... about 4 x 7.5, basically enough to cover the center area of one of the rectangle so it doesn't hit the sewing line.

3. Iron the interfacing on one of the rectangle fabrics (onto the wrong side of the fabric). You'll want to center the interfacing onto one of the rectangles and make sure that the smooth side is on top and the bumpy side is on the bottom. Then go ahead and iron it on, it should take a few seconds on each area. The interfacing will basically attach itself to the fabric.

4. Sew together the two rectangles with the right sides together and the wrong sides away from each other. You'll sew almost all the way around leaving a small opening in the middle of one of the small sides. See the picture for the sewing line. The small opening is on the right side.



5.Cut the corners off. This gives you cleaner corners when you invert the fabric.


6. Invert the fabric by pulling the inside out and the outside in.

7. Use a pen to form the corners from the inside.


8. Optional: Here I try to iron down the long edges flat on the sewing line. This makes a cleaner fold when you fold down on the sewing line. (I actually did this after step 10 then did step 9 again, but it probably would have made more sense to do it on before step 9.

9. Iron the edges of the rectangle. Particularly, fold and iron in the opening so that the edge is straight


10. Sew the edge with an opening from long side to long side.

11. Fold up the side with the sewn edge to form the pocket area.

12. Sew along both side edges, do a small reverse sew right where the folded up edge meets with the rest of the fabric.

13. You're done at this point. The only thing left to do is to add on the snaps. The craft blog (craftster.org) where I found the original easy peasy wallets also do a great job of explaining how to add on these snaps to the wallet. I wanted to do the instructions for these as well but, my pictures didn't come out... so just follow the instructions on the craftster site. Sorry!

14. Put the gift cards in, attach a gift tag inside, and give the gift to someone special.

I hope that gives an idea for this Christmas (tho, it might be a little late, sorry again), or maybe for other gifts throughout the year.... or maybe for a wallet or for a business card holder, or whatever. I've recently made a camo one to store some gift cards that I've recently received.
Also, as this will probably be the last post that I'll put out before Christmas, I'd like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas!