It's Raining JellyBeans: How to Save $$$$$: Tags

With my renewed love of rubber stamping and especially my obsession with Tim Holtz's background techniques-specifically Marbled Stains- I am walking through a lot of #8 shipping tags.

Historically, I have always used regular #4 Avery shipping tags from my local office supply store. The Avery #4 tags are cheap, easily obtained, and sold in bulk….perfect. But things have changed…I've changed….the #4 no longer meets my needs. I've moved on. Now I NEED the #8 tag and I need a lot of them. You see, Marbled Stains has become a guilty pleasure. Once my Distress Stains hit my craft sheet it is all over people. The ideas just start and won't stop and suddenly I NEED to know what Broken China, Picket Fence, and Chipped Sapphire will look like. My heat gun is going full speed, stains are squeezed onto the craft sheet-the caps a jumble to the side- as tags are dragged through the various puddles of colored inks.

Marbled Stains have become my crack. Mommy crack? Crafter Crack? I don't know. But I do know that the #4 tags no longer fulfill me needs. I have moved on to #8 tags and the extra space they give me for designing. The sobering part of all this fun is that I was paying $4 for 20 #8 tags at Michael's. My local office supply stories do not sell the larger tags. This week I decided to do something about it. With Google I quickly found I can get 1000 tags for less than $30. Seriously?! Imagine all the Marbled Stain tags I can make with that box of tags!

The best deal I found was at Shoplet.com. I was able to get 1000 tags for $27.98. They offer free shipping for orders over $45. I simply added two packages of Epson 4 Star Premium Presentation Paper (at $11.24 each) which put me over and I received free shipping. I found a few other online stores with similar prices for the tags but they all had $10-13 for shipping.

If you do any printing at home and haven't tried Epson 4-or 5-Star Presentation Paper I recommend you give it a try. This is not a photo paper. Epson makes photo paper that is packaged and labeled very similar to the Presentation Paper, so be careful when shopping. The 5-Star is my favorite, but is hard to find so I use 4-Star most of the time. I learned this hint from Jessica Sprague who does all her digital art printing at home. The Presentation papers are heavier than regular printer paper but not as heavy as cardstock though the 5-star comes close. The quality of the print and the vibrancy of the colors is superior to any other paper I have used. I used the 4-Star for all the hybrid projects I've made over the last 2 years including: