Easy Wrapping Paper

For some odd reason, there are times when I just have to get a gift wrapped and finished with to go to a party or I’m helping my mom wrap some Christmas gifts and we’ve run out because we just had to get every single one of my cousins a gift and had to wrap it all in the nice wrapping paper. So what’s a girl to do? She gets a little bit crafty with the wrapping process.

Newspaper/newsprint is pretty much godly. You can use it as packaging material to stop a fragile gift from rolling around and you can also use it to wrap gifts with, provide you have something funny on the outside (ie. political cartoons, the Sunday comics) or just something that the gift givee will appreciate (if they like an actor, have the actor’s latest movie’s review facing out). It’s simple and effective and plus maybe they won’t notice that you tacked on an extra twenty layers of wrapping before they actually get to the gift.

Various sizes of wrapping paper is also effective. You can get several pieces of different sized wrapping paper in all sorts of different colours and just sort of artistically cover the box with them. It makes for an interesting effect and plus you’ll actually find a use for all those odds and ends of wrapping paper that have been sitting in the box for years.

Large pieces of paper, acrylic paint and potato halves. Oh, I am quite serious. Carve out something nifty to make a potato stamp (hearts and stars are relatively easy if you have a steady hand) and stamp away at the paper. If it’s for a Christmas gift, stamp out shapes in red and green. If it’s for a person’s birthday, use their favourite colours. It’s also a nice way to use up the potatoes in the house when you’ve gotten sick of eating potatoes for the eleventh meal in a row.

If you’re really feeling kind of childish, you could break out the crayons and just draw random things onto paper before covering the gift. Or you could make it look slightly more sophisticated by drawing something remotely related to the holiday, just in crayons and all. Or you just pick out the person’s favourite colour and just write their name over and over again on the paper until it’s filled.

But if you’re like me and you can’t find your crayons anymore, you can always find some watercolour paints and paint stripes onto the paper or some other kind of simple paper that will make it appear as if you spent ages working on the wrapping paper alone rather than five seconds. After all, isn’t it the thought that counts?