Paper Bag Craft: Gingerbread House Gift Bag

If you need some pretty gift bags for small Christmas gifts, you can turn a brown lunch bag into a beautiful gingerbread house gift bag. These gingerbread house gift bags are the perfect size bags to hold food gifts such as cookies, muffins, homemade candy or even some fresh fruit. You can also use these bags to hold other small gifts like little toys, mittens, DVDs, gift cards, etc.

How you decorate your gingerbread gift bag is totally up to you. I will give you the basics and you can decorate any way you want. But, to give you an idea of what your finished gift bag might look like, click here to see an image. You can also see this image for another way to decorate your bag. The second gift bag is not made from a brown paper bag, but the idea is the same. In fact, you don't have to use a brown paper bag. Any craft bag will work. The brown bag just makes it look like gingerbread.

Start by filling the bag with whatever gift you are tucking inside. If you want the bag to hold its shape, you can line the inside of the bag with cardboard inserts. Just cut some cereal boxes to fit and attach them to the inside of the bag using double stick tape or a glue stick. Then fold the top of the bag over and staple it closed.

Cut two pieces of brown craft foam or brown construction paper to make the roof. Cut the pieces just a bit wider than the bag and about 3 or 4 inches tall. Attach to each side of the bag using glue or staples (use the image as a guide).

Now you are ready to decorate the gingerbread house. You can use craft foam or construction paper to make your decorative pieces. You can also buy pre cut Christmas foam shapes (trees, stars, snowmen, etc.) if you prefer. Most craft stores carry them or you can order them online.

If you want to design the entire house on your own, you can cut your decoration free hand. If you are not comfortable doing that, you can print some online clip art to use as patterns, or you can even trace around cookie cutters. Do not worry about making perfect shapes. Just use the images (image 1, image 2) as a guide to give you ideas as to how to decorate your gingerbread house. Your kids will have no trouble coming up with ideas of their own.

One fun thing you might want to try is to cut images out of magazines and use those on your gift bags. You might find nice images of actual windows or an actual door. You can also make it look like a dog or a child is looking out a window by pasting a little picture of a face then adding window panes over the picture to make it look like the face is behind the glass. Once you start searching through magazine pages, you will find all sorts of images to use for your gingerbread house.

You can also use things like buttons, ribbon, and bows to decorate your gift bags. You could even hang a little wreath (that you make, of course) on the door. The ideas are endless!

If you need a large gift bag, you can use this idea with a large brown grocery store bag. You can also decorate a big brown box the same way (just use extra cardboard to make a roof).

Sources for the images: www.makingfriends.com, www.retrotoys.com