Merry Christmas

For those of you celebrating Christmas today, I hope you have a lovely day surrounded by family and friends. 

This year I wrapped my gifts in brown paper (including Trader Joe's paper grocery bags) with red seam binding and greens from the garden.  Here's one of them:

I hope Santa was good to you this year.  I received a new macro lens for my camera - I can't wait to use it. 

Merry Christmas!

Ali

6 Ways to Wrap Gifts Using Vintage Paper

 

I've been having a lot of fun including vintage paper in my holiday gift wrapping this year.  I thought I'd share with some ways that you could incorporate some lovely old book pages or vintage sheet music into your packaging too.

1.  Vintage Paper Gift Wrap

Use old book pages to wrap the entire gift.  This works well for small gifts because you're restricted by the size of the pages.  Here I used vintage sheet music to wrap an iTunes gift card and finished it off with seam binding and a gold accent.

2. Vintage Paper Bows

Cut strips of old books to form a bow.  Here I used over sized dictionary pages - the large loops were cut to 1" wide and the smaller inner loops on top were cut to 1/2" wide. I finished off the center with a vintage button.

3. Vintage Paper Bag Toppers

Transform a plain bag into something special by creating a bag topper from vintage paper.  I just folded a rectangle of sheet music in half, stapled it to the top of the closed bag and hid the staple with a bow.

4. Vintage Paper Belly Bands

Cover the gift in regular wrapping paper, then create a belly band from vintage paper to bring it up a notch.

5. Vintage Paper Tags

Use a die cutting machine or handheld punch to create tags from old book pages and sheet music:

6. Vintage Paper Accents

Cut a piece of an old map or sheet music and glue it to the front of a parcel.  Here I used spray adhesive to attach a map of the East Coast to a gift wrapped in simple kraft paper.

There are more pictures of my Christmas packages in this post.  Got a great idea for packaging gifts using old book pages?  Leave a link and/or comment below.

Linking to:

A Crafty Soiree
Hodgepodge Friday
Crafty Happy Scrappy 
The Shabby Nest

Savy Southern Style

Happy Wrapping!

Ali

My Recycled Christmas Wrapping

As always, I was late getting my Christmas gifts in the mail to my family in the UK and Sweden.  Every year I buy all the gifts early and then never mail them in time - sigh.....  Even though they might arrive a day or two late, they were wrapped up nicely :)

Here are some of the gifts I wrapped up for the men in the family.  The first two used recycled kraft paper, old book pages, bakers twine and hand stamped tags.

 

The final boy gift is for one of my brothers who loves New York City.  I bought him a piece of artwork in Greenwich village a few months ago and the package features a map of the East Coast.  I guess I could have used a subway map, but this was lying around my studio from another project, so on it went!

  

The girly gifts also have recycled kraft paper as their base and they're jazzed up with some rich berry colored satin ribbon, old sheet music and vintage buttons.

The lovely rosette on this package (for my mum) is from a kit very generously sent to me by my blogging buddy, Donna Vere.

I still have piles more to do - I wonder if they'll be as pretty as these ones?  How's your Christmas wrapping going? If you've posted any cool ideas or pictures on your blog, feel free to leave a link in the comments. 

Happy Wrapping!

Ali