By Angelina Williams
We have a tradition in our house of not using conventional wrapping paper. It may have started during a particularly broke period in our lives but it’s persisted because it’s way more fun to come up with creative (often weird) ways of wrapping presents. It also uses things I have on hand so I don’t have to go buy holiday wrapping paper that I find boring or depressing. I’m going to be really up-front with you all, I happen to have a lot of crafty things on hand which is useful. But today I want to show you some of the wrapping ideas I came up with this week that don’t require particularly exotic or numerous supplies to make.
Basic materials I use here are: double sided tape, regular clear tape, staples, scissors, grocery store mailers, used bubble wrap, grocery bags, cracker boxes, magazine pages, and black felt pens. Slightly less basic materials: hot glue gun, glitter glue, kraft paper, dot pattern drafting paper, vintage magazine pages, buttons, and cut up old dictionary pages.
In previous years I’ve never used the bubble wrap I always save so I’ve used it in two different ways this year.
In the above wrapping I made an exotic bubble wrap flower by cutting out petal shapes to alternate with long thin strips of plain kraft paper and stapling them together. Then I curled the strips of kraft paper with scissors and glued an old button to the center. I used a heavy duty double sided tape to adhere the decoration to the package.
For this rolled up magazine package (you can apply this wrapping to a rolled up t-shirt, a paperboard tube, or a rolled up piece of artwork) I used the bubble wrap as the main wrapping and then created a little extra coverage by taping part of a page of a vintage magazine I have around the bubble wrap. My vintage magazine was already falling apart so no sacrilege to beautiful old printings was committed. Then I decorated using a simpler version of the bubble wrap flower I already showed you.
I have a large number of old buttons on hand and know I will never use them all for clothing or other craft projects so I wanted to use them for wrapping this year. Here’s what I came up with:
I started with a slightly different idea involving gold thread but it didn’t work very well. It doesn’t bother me when my ideas don’t work out as I planned because I always end up with something interesting in the process. I used a scrap of dot drafting paper for this package because I often have pieces of this left over from drafting clothing patterns that are too small to use for other drafting projects. I picked a selection of buttons I liked the look of together and without too much planning glued them all around the box in a band. I don’t like things to look over-wrought, I like a little bit of randomness when doing projects like this. When the gold thread idea failed I decided to use black felt marker to visually connect the buttons so they look more bold.
If you like this idea but don’t have a ready stash of buttons like I do, see if you can find extra buttons on the inside of button-up shirts in your closet. Most button-ups come with some extra buttons in case you lose some. Or maybe a friend has more buttons than they can use and will share. I got a lot of my buttons in bag lots from thrift stores so you might try that. The point is that none of these were expensive to begin with and are fun to use for wrapping presents.
This decoration I made is kind of weird. I admit it. From some angles it almost looks obscene. Even so, I’m sharing it because it was easy and fun to make and I’m pretty sure no one in my family, and probably yours too, has seen anything quite like it. I wrapped the book in grocery mailers, something I’ve been doing for many years. Then I constructed this odd decoration using strips of kraft paper and cut up strips of an old dictionary.
Before you go crying out against cutting dictionaries up, let me assure you I didn’t do it! My husband is an artist and he was collecting shredded up old dictionaries for a long time and finally decided to use one of the ones in really bad shape for a project. Later he gave the rest of the strip to me. I love dictionaries (to actually look things up in) but I have no problem cutting one up if its cover is in tatters and the spine is wrecked and you will have no trouble locating such a sad specimen in a thrift store or on a hoarder’s shelf just waiting to be loved in a new way.
The last idea I came up with this year is probably the cheapest and easiest to do:
I wrapped the box in a used paper grocery bag. Then I took apart a cracker box. I cut out several five-petaled flower shapes in two different sizes. I applied glitter glue to the edges and once dry I used double stick tape to attach the smaller flower shapes on top of the larger ones. You can leave it like that. It looked cool. But my husband wanted something more and I already had my buttons out so I hot glued buttons for the middles. If you don’t have buttons you could cut flower middles out of the grocery bag.
There was a time when wrapping presents was tedious to me but for the last decade I just let myself have fun and be weird with the wrapping and my family has come to look forward to seeing what strangeness I put under the tree every year. My husband loves to illustrate and so he’s taken to making drawings on the wrapping which we also love. And my mom, also an artist, has been applying her love of fiber arts to present wrapping doing interesting package ties with different kinds of yarns and knots.
If you don’t already have fun with your present wrapping, now’s a great time to start. It will take one more potentially tedious task and turn it into a fun activity to look forward to.
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