Christmas Gift Wrap Inspo

Boring old Christmas paper is so yesterday. Wrap up Christmas this year with whatever is lying around the house & in the back of you jewellery box

Christmas gift wrap is so out of fashion and no one with either style or a planetary consciousness would be caught dead with that tired old green and red santa, saw that at the supermarket, gee look at that - same as mine, wrapping paper.

This Christmas, make your own designer wrap statement and use either recycled paper (of any kind as long as it's clean!), old fabrics & clothes or gifts to wrap your gifts. 

Wrapping with fabric

Wrapping with fabric is easier than most people realise. Use any kind of fabric you have lying around, including old clothes that you can cut up. Old clothes are great especially as you can use the stitched seams and buttons for your bow.

To wrap with fabric, there are two ways to do it:

1. Simply wrap your gift, with the folds at the bottom or back and tie with string as in the example shown above.
2. Create a tie as the bow using the fabric itself. In the pic below, if you look carefully, you will see she has wrapped from the bottom of the gift. Sit the gift on your fabric near the centre. Fold the shorter sides under and over itself and use the longer sides for the bow. In this pic, she has also cut another piece of fabric to add another bow, which she has layered over the first folds, ready to add after she ties off the first bow. You can tie in bits of rosemary, gum, even cherries (best on Christmas morning) into your bow for living colour.

As well as recycled fabrics, use a second gift as wrap. I love this one as this gift can even be a regifted gift and you don't even have to say a word!  Aprons, tea towels, tote bags and anything you can imagine that covers your main gift with personality and style. 

The endless options of recycled paper

First of all, I know there are beautiful kraft and brown paper pics everywhere, tied up with string like this one below. But please don't buy brown paper if you don't have any already. And remember that brown paper wrap can be made from bags too. In this example,  Julie Darrell used 100% cotton twine with brown packing paper. The lemons were from a friends lemon tree which she dehydrated. She also does versions with newspaper or scraps of ribbon which are equally beautiful. 

The idea of snipping some of your paper and turning it into an origami-esk christmas tree as you can see below is very clever, as are our two little people on the left.

Music books

If you have school aged children, you will soon be crying about the endless waste that is out of date school text books, sheets of music and work books.  One of my favourite paper wrappings is sheet music. There is some double joy in it as it encompasses the joy of music as well as gifting.  Atlases are also fantastic for colour and conversation. 



These are just a few of the most beautiful examples we could find on social media. If you have others, please let us know and we will add. And if you are a Furoshiki disciple, @plantedinthewoods has several examples in her feed.

Images: Unsplash: Marcus Spiske / Instagram: @angelaliguori @bringyourownlongbeach  Multiple paper: owansstudio |  justineview | melliandsophie Music Sheets: @glamourbibliotekaren

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