This morning my kid and I were up in the earliest of early hours - the delirium must have opened my chakras or cleared any creative blocks because I came up with a great way to wrap my niece's birthday present!
Free wrapping paper is so much better than buying a roll of printed-in-china, non-recycled, expensive, trash destined decoration, right? Plus, it's totally recycled!
First I got a few magazines that were headed for the "free box" (I put out magazines on my stoop for passers-by to take with them - and I usually get them free from someone else's stoop in the first place!) and started flipping through. Any page with pink graphics or girly motifs were torn out - my niece is 6 tomorrow, and WAY into pinkness.
With a hefty pile of pink pages in front of me, I culled any corners that contained logos, annoying anti-girl-power imagery or non-cute pictures, and kept the rest. Then I just started taping all the bits and pieces together on the gift box (also recycled from a shipment, of course) and voila!
This got me thinking - why not create a movement for the upcoming holidays? The NO WRAP PACT! Everyone agrees not to buy any new wrapping materials and only wrap presents in hand-made paper crafts like the above, or pretty fabric scraps, old paper bags that your kid has covered with drawings and glitter...get creative! Why not just drape every present under a different holiday throw or old, soft baby blanket! The whole family can sit around and do a knee-slapping drum roll before each present is unveiled - instead of all that wasted, pretty-sad paper being balled up into garbage bags the day after christmas.
It's a movement! I just decided! Pass it on -
Love Alex, the New Home Eco-Nomics Expert
3 comments:
My Mom used to use the 'funny papers' or recycle papers in (non-english) script because it looked decorative and was free! She would also create origami wrapping 'critters' using recycled newspaper or grocery bags. For ties she'd use scraps of yarn or colored string. Since she had lived through the 30s depression as an artist she was (is!) way ahead of the curve with creative & inexpensive options. Your magazine pages would make pretty origami ornaments too!
Keep up the great ideas!
I like to reuse bags for "presenting" gifts.'Cept I often have to deal with the bags brandishing their logos and flyin' their colors.
So, what I do is either I create an original bit of art from colored paper, cardboard, whatever, that has to do with the gift or is inpired by the person I am giving the gift to or I cut out an image from a magazine or the like and cover the logo.
I gifted some local honey along with info 'bout its amazing properties to my daugthers boyfriend.
I presented the honey in a bag with a rendition of a beehive glued on it that I fashioned out of a piece of cardboard from our recycling basket that I first cut into the shape of a beehive, then peeled a layer back to reveal the corrugation.
Sometimes you can just color in or draw over some of the logos.
I just got this idea as I am writing - I feel like a frickin Stepford wife Alex, look at what your causing - to just cut the logo out and use leftover tissue wrap, odd bits of wrapping paper, etc. and either allow it to poke through or glue from inside and allow the cut out to frame it.
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