Christmas Wrapping

I love Christmas and I’m obsessed with wrapping presents and trying to make them look pretty. I’ve tried to use quite cheap resources as I often go a bit shopping crazy and spend lots of money on the actual presents. It’s only two days till christmas and these are very quick and easy ideas to make presents look a bit more special that you could do.

I love brown paper for wrapping especially if it is matte. I got a few of these papers at Bath’s Christmas market to support Graphic Design students but I also made bits by myself as I study graphic design too. I designed and printed the snowflake paper, it’s my first try at printing wrapping paper and I am really pleased with how it turned out. But an easy alternative to screen printing could be stamps and white ink, which you could probably buy at Hobbycraft or Amazon and make a simple repeated pattern.

Box shapes are always very easy to wrap and therefore I don’t ever want to leave them just plain. On this one I’ve decided to use red and white twine which I got from Ikea, it sort of reminds me of candy canes and you could probably replace the bit of tree with a candy cane which would look nice. But I just cut a tiny piece of my Christmas tree off and have stuck it in with the label. I picked this label up at a vintage fair this year as I’m always on the look out for cute things to make wrapping look pretty.

For these presents I used my own wrapping paper as they are all for my mum and I know she’ll appreciate the paper more than anyone else. I’ve used a mix of materials to make these look more special. The dried orange piece and cinnamon stick had fallen off a wreath I’d bought so I wanted to make the most of them. The orange piece was quite tricky to tie on as it wouldn’t stick to the paper but I used the twine again and threaded it through the hole in the middle. I also used a pine cone thats been sprayed with silver, which I probably could have made myself, that I bought from Sainsbury’s. I bought a whole box of them for only £1.50, some of which I’ve hung on my tree so they were perfect. I found a heart cutter from when I was younger that I’d bought from Hobbycraft to stick the little hearts on the tags and a stamp which I think looks really cute.