DIY Wood Bead Stocking Tags

Dress up your stockings this year with these personalized wood bead stocking tags. Just print off the tags and color the beads if you wish! These would also work great for gift tags!

Not sure if stocking tags are a trendy thing here in the last couple of years, but they sure are popping up everywhere I look. I saw a picture on Pinterest of the cutest stocking tags and fell in love with them. However, being the thrifty, crafty person I am, I was inspired to make some DIY wood bead stocking tags.

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase. I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself.

I have not used stocking tags previously because we usually use these knitted stockings with our names on them. So really no need for tags. However, this year I wanted to get some white stockings to use with my colorful Christmas décor. I found these knitted stockings on Amazon.

They are really nice quality and for a very good price! I bought them in November for $24, so it seems the price goes up the closer to Christmas that we get. If you are looking for some next year, buy them early!

If you don’t deem yourself crafty or are not motivated to make your own, you could always buy some like these stocking tags from Etsy. These are similar to the picture I saw on Pinterest initially. I love how they have a lasered wood slice for the initial but I needed an easier way for my DIY version. So I made up some printable tags that you all can easily make as well. 🙂

I chose to paint every other bead of my tags to coordinate with my color scheme. You could paint them to match your colors or don’t paint them at all! They look great either way!

Supplies to make stocking tags

Wood Beads (size 25mm)
Kraft Colored Card Stock
Scissors
Acrylic Paint – I found my paint at Walmart, the colors I used are:
- Apple Barrel: Lime Tree, Cameo Pink, Caribbean, Aquamarine (toned down using 1/2 white mixture), Bright Red
- FolkArt: Magenta
Foam Brushes
Jute Twine
Bamboo Skewer Sticks
1/8″ hole punch
Printable Tags
- A-L
- M-X
- Y-9

Painting the Wood Beads

This portion is optional. I wanted my colors to coordinate but you may want to leave all the woods beads a natural color. If that is what you prefer, skip this portion. I found the easiest way to paint the wood beads was to slide them onto a bamboo skewer stick.

This allowed me to not only limit the amount of paint I got on my fingers (even though as you can see, I still got a bit on there), but I was able to paint a couple at a time. I painted the top half of the beads then set them on a Styrofoam plate to dry. Then just turn the stick over and paint the other half.

You can even paint multiple at a time if you have several bamboo skewers and foam brushes. I painted two coats on the beads.

Printing and cutting out the tags

Print the necessary letters of the tags you will need on kraft colored card stock. You can find the link to the free printables above in the supplies list. Cut apart the letters into squares to make it easier to follow the line of the circle. Next cut out the circle closely hugging the outside of the black line.

Finally, punch out the 1/8th inch circle by which you will attach your tag. If you do not have a 1/8th inch hole punch, you can always use an ice pick. Just put something like foam underneath so you don’t crinkle your tag.

Assembling the stocking tags

String your beads onto the end of the twine and add your cut out tag.

Tie a square knot on the back of the tag so the twine does not come untied. To tie a square knot, it starts just like when you tie your shoes. Only instead of making the loops, you do what you just did only going the opposite way. So if your strings went left over right on the first pass, now they need to go right over left. If that is not clear, just google how to tie a square knot. 😉

Measure a loop against the size of the loop on your stockings and cut the twine leaving a little length to tie a knot.

Keeping your loop the correct size, tie a knot to sit on the top bead. You can see in the picture below how I tied the knot. It slides along the twine so you can fit it snug against the bead. Not sure what kind of knot this is, I may have just made it up. Ha!

Hang and enjoy

Now all that is left is to hang your stockings and stocking tags and enjoy them. Usually most people hang their stockings on a mantel or stairway but seeing as we do not have either of those in this house, I had to get creative this year. At first I had them hanging on the backs of chairs at the table. Don’t they look great with the colored ornaments in our sugar mold?

But I had another idea I wanted to try. We used a branch to hang the stockings over the couch. I think it turned out really cute. What do you all think?

We hung the branch using a couple of command hooks. Then I used some foliage to hide the hooks. It looks pretty cool on the wall and adds some dimension as it sticks out from the wall a bit.