And yet brown paper bags and sheets of newspaper, the go-to gift wrap for the thrifty and eco-minded, aren’t so much…well…cute. And what will my relatives think of me, when I hand them a gift that was clearly wrapped with paper taken straight from my recycling bin? To solve the cuteness dilemma, I spent a lot of effort decorating my first several packages with various upcycled materials and stash components. And then… …I did something different.
My first efforts were spent disguising the brown paper and newspaper with various decorative elements, also stash or upcycled. For my cousin Zack’s present (zombie-themed targets for the rifle range, in case you were curious), I painted his name and a background directly onto the brown paper. This turned out great, and didn’t take a ton of time. I spent more time putting together the three-dimensional snowflake from toilet paper rolls. It turned out great, too, and was fun to make, but it took WAY too much time to create, and getting it sturdily hot glued to the gift without letting giant amounts of hot glue show was a pain in the butt. I also painted my Uncle Art’s name on his present (more zombie-themed targets!)–this may be my new favorite gift wrapping trick. To decorate his package, however, I cut out a junk mail snowflake, which took mere minutes, but actually gluing it to the package was fiddly and time-consuming, and I was really disappointed with how it ended up looking. Another fail! Next »
I changed tactics when I began wrapping my daughters’ presents. We go through a lot of print-outs in our homeschool–handwriting sheets, spelling lists, vocabulary terms, etc–so I ran the blank sides of our used paper back through my laser printer and printed out a selection of Christmas-themed printables with which I decoupaged some of their gifts. Overall, I liked this method a LOT. The cutting and gluing is quick and simple, the variety of free Christmas-themed printables available online is mind-boggling, and it’s easy to make each wrapped gift very different from the others. I also like how easy it is to embellish even odd-sized packages. I had a hell of a time wrapping the very odd-shaped gift above (a Zome Tool kit, because I absolutely pretend that homeschool supplies are presents), but it took just a couple of minutes to print, cut out, and glue together the vintage jointed-limb paper Santa printable onto it, and then to use a little hot glue and embroidery thread to attach a tear-away gift tag from Country Living Deck the Halls. On the other hand… I don’t know what kind of printer YOU have, but whenever I print something, I feel the way that my Pappaw probably feels when he watches one of us kids just stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open while we decide what we want. That drives Pappaw bonkers because it’s like he can feel the pennies leaching out of his pocket for the electric bill, and when I watch all that pricey ink leaving my print cartridges, I feel the same way! And that’s when I had enough, and I thought, “Who cares if the present is wrapped in newspaper? You know what’s inside? A PRESENT!!!” All the rest of the presents under the tree are simple, wrapped in plain newspaper with a single gift tag to decorate them. And you know, I actually think that they look pretty cute there, all mitchy-matchy to each other, and understated in their black-and-white compared to the multi-colored cacophony that is our kid-decorated Christmas tree. I’m no longer a newspaper and brown paper bag wrapping paper apologist.
