Pat's Corner; 46; Holiday Wrapping

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hi there. Do you still have a bunch of gifts to wrap up but you've run out of wrapping paper? Or you haven't got enough pieces that are large enough to cover the box you have on hand?

Today I'd like to show you some ideas about things you can do for wrapping paper and ribbons that might help you out of your dilemma. The other concern that I have too is that wrapping papers become very expensive. We may have a fairly inexpensive but creative gift and find out that the wrapping that we're going to put on it is going to cost more than the gift itself. So let's look at some ideas for wrapping our gifts in interesting ways, but using inexpensive easily gained materials. One of the first things that we might think about is using leftover paper. Now this is a piece of foil type paper. It's very shiny, tear fairly easily, and I tend to save paper if it's possible. So I do this quite often. Now this has tape on it. And this type of paper, if you're going to tear the tape off, you can tear the paper fairly easily and you can see that I've torn this piece of paper. So you may want to cut that edge off. But sometimes if you save paper, you wonder how you're going to get the wrinkles out.

So one of the easiest ways to do that is to take the paper and iron it. And I have a cloth here. It's actually an old sugar sack and an iron and I don't have any steam in this iron because I don't want to get my paper all wet. Now sometimes your papers want iron very well, but these foil backs papers seem to do fairly well. So if you've saved paper from a year before, from another time, you can use that paper by pressing it and getting most of the wrinkles out. Now this is something you may already have thought about, but you may not have thought about ironing it. Then I usually look at the right side and find out where the bad places are. You probably have to wrap a smaller present in this, but then start cutting off the parts that are bad. Just throw those away or you can make a gift tag out of that part. Here where it's badly bent. But you see you've salvaged this piece of paper and of course something like this, which is a very nice paper, is fairly expensive to purchase in the first place.

So if you have a chance to save it, you can use it for another gift. I have a smaller piece of course, but it's going to work okay. So look at your papers, even tissue paper, you can press it, don't use a real hot iron, but it is possible to iron it. Now that's just using paper that has already been used. We'll set that aside. Now another thing that we can iron is ribbon, and this is a fairly nice piece of ribbon. I've never tried ironing paper ribbon, and I'm going to cut off one end of this just because it's sort of askewaggled up. But this is ribbon, which is sort of a cloth type of ribbon, like your hair ribbons might be. And you can press it and get the worst of the wrinkles out. Tends to want to pop up on me.

Often anymore, you'll find that your packages are not wrapped with this nice cloth ribbon, but you may have a plastic ribbon or something that is not really salvageable. But if you have a very nice cloth ribbon, such as this one, you can press it out, get all the wrinkles out of it. Even some of the places where it's been tied very tightly, if you press it carefully, you'll be able to get the wrinkles out. And you see that piece of ribbon I'm going to be able to use. Maybe at this end I'll do it again. So the first thing to remember may not help you this year for wrapping things, but you can use pieces that have already been on a package, and you can press them. You might need to dampen them a little bit if they're really badly wrinkled, and it's cloth ribbon that it won't hurt.

Sometimes you'll have velveting ribbon and you need to steam it more than just... You might have noticed, too, this is the cheating way to iron. I put the iron down and I pull the ribbon underneath it like this. That way you get it all done real quickly and you don't have to move your other hand, lazy man's way. But it works. So here's some ribbon that we've saved. Here's some paper that we've saved. We've pressed it and we're going to use it again. But suppose you haven't saved any paper ribbon and there's nothing you can do about it now, but you're going to do... Well, let's start looking at some of the things that we can do to make up some wrapping ideas. If you have an odd-shaped something, we have our sugar sack here. Now you may not want it to say you and I sugar on the outside, but then if you don't mind, you could use the whole sack and you can just put something down inside of it and tie it up like this on the top. You can also make cloth bags if you're a person that sews,

take some extra pieces of fabric and make a bag, and then put your item in it. Particularly if you have something that is sort of lumpy and you can't find a box that it fits into. The other thing that you can do with this muslin type of bag is that you can write on it. You might even just use this part and make it smaller, but you can take a felt tip pin. And you can just write on it whatever you want to say. I'm trying to write Merry Christmas. I'll probably spell it wrong, but you see you can write on the bag and use it that way. So if you can't find anything else, grab a sugar sack if you happen to have one or another piece of fabric and you'll find that it works quite well. If you're an artist, draw a picture on it. I'm not very good at that, so we won't do that. Now another thing that you might use,

suppose you're giving a kitchen item, this is a used towel, but if you had a new one, you could wrap your box or your item up in this type of a wrapping. I don't have a box, it's really big enough, but you could wrap the towel around and tie it with some type of string or something. And so this is part of the gift is using the towel. We'll set that aside. Here's another type of towel if you're giving a bath gift. Take one of the towels that's in the gift selection and use it for the wrapping. Just take your whole piece of fabric, your whole piece of tolling and use it for the wrapping itself. Sometimes if you're giving fabric types of gifts, you can just actually do that, wrap your gift right up in the towel or the piece of fabric itself. For someone who's a home sewer and you're giving them some sewing items,

then take a piece of fabric. And this is just some red and white fabric. Probably larger than you'd want to use, but if that's part of the gift, again, wrap your gift, and I'm not sure how to wrap packages. I'm just giving you some ideas. Wrap your gift in the fabric. You might tie it with a tape measure. You might tie it with some thread from a spool of thread. You might want to tie it with some embroidery cotton, whatever it is. And if this is going to be some fabric that you're going to do some embroidery on, maybe the instructions will be inside. And so you're actually using this as the wrapping. So those are some fabric ideas that you can use for wrapping up a gift. Now, maybe you don't have those kinds of things available. So you'd like to look at some paper ideas. Well, there's a lot of things we can do with paper. Sometimes at the store, you will get an item in a paper sack. It's just plain old white like this, or you can buy white sacks,

or you might even find colored ones. If it's all wrinkled and you're worried about it, again, iron your sack, make sure it isn't too hot. So here's your sack, and then you can just do all kinds of different things with your paper sack. Again, if you're very artistic, you can draw pictures on it. I'm not very artistic. I can't think of anything to draw. Let's see. Let's make it look like a holly. I have the wrong color. This is blue. Should be green. If you're really good, you could draw a reindeer, but I'm not any good at that. That's supposed to look like holly berries. And then you can say two, and whoever, and then from, and just use your sack. Or if you happen to have some little stickers, sometimes it's possible to buy stickers, and these are just some Christmas seals that stick on, and you can put stickers on it and then say two and from.

So that's another idea, but just using a paper sack. Again, this is a good idea for something that's a funny shape. You know, that's lumpy and doesn't fit in very well. You can also do the same thing with a brown paper sack. Suppose you are wondering, you need a larger sack, and you can't get it colored. Did you ever think of using a brown sack? You can also put stickers on this type of a sack. You can use, what happened to my red one? You can use a red pen, write things on it. You can put a Santa picture on it if you have one. You can cut a picture out of a magazine and stick it on. However, it was that you happen to want to stick something on here, and you can even use loose sticks, and I seem to have forgotten my glue stick. But anyway, paper sacks can be used. They're sturdy. If you're afraid the gift will move around in there, put some newspaper around it, or some tissue paper, something of that sort. So don't think you can't use a paper sack.

Now, if you're giving a gift to someone who likes to travel or you would like to have the gift is something to use for traveling, find an old map. Here's a map of California. It doesn't matter what the map is of, but by wrapping the gift up in a map, or a piece of a map, it makes an interesting looking package for the traveler. You actually are using the map as the paper, and you can tie it with whatever string you want, or not put any tie on it at all. So that's another something that you might have extras up around is a map. Another idea for paper is a dress pattern. And sometimes if you have an old dress pattern, you want to use the inside page as you can use that. I can't ever get maps folded back up right, so we will just leave that one sort of funny. But anyway, if you're really desperate

and you don't have any ideas, try some magazine packages, and you might even stick them together, cut off the letters, so they don't show. If you have a little tiny box, this box is probably too big. You might wrap the whole box in the package, but this one is a little big. So you might want to take a larger piece of paper and stick all of these pictures on it, sort of like a collage. And I'm not cutting these carefully. I'm just getting rid of the writing. I don't want any of the writing on here. Here's some bread picture. Nice colors on it. We'll cut out the writing. And then you could take these and take a piece of paper, maybe tissue paper or any other type of paper, and stick these on the paper in a whole collage.

And by using lots of different ones, you'll have all kinds of different colors. And I don't have any glue here. I've dropped my glue stick somewhere along the way, but you can stick these on the paper and then use that as your wrapping paper. It's sort of different, but if you're looking for something that is inexpensive and that you can fix quickly, magazine pages will work, and you can do all kinds of different colors by choosing the pictures carefully. Then, of course, if you want something specific like a car or a truck or whatever, you can look for that type of picture and just do that anyway. Now, another gift wrapping that you can use is a paper plate. These are the inexpensive types of paper plates, and you can fold it in half like this, decorate it if you want to. It gives you sort of a poofed out something to put something in. And then I have a little stapler here,

and what I'm going to do is close it up. Put your gift inside first, before you do this. If you get it all closed up, you can't get anything in it. But anyway, in a desperate moment if you can't find anything to pack your gift in, dry a paper plate folded in half, and again, you can use the stickers, which I had here a minute ago, and I've misplaced. Well, here they are. If you don't have stickers, draw a picture on it or cut a picture out of a magazine or something like that, but you see you can stick the sticker on right on it. You could put lace on the edge if you wanted. You know, the best creative is that you want to, but this makes a very attractive wrapping for something. Now, here's something else you can do with a paper plate. You cut out sort of a pie-shaped piece. If you're real fussy about the size,

measure it first, and then fold it up so it makes a shape like this. Now, you can put something inside. You can even put a string on the top and hang it up. Lots of different things you can do with this, but you can put your gift inside, and it will hold it if you have colored paper plates. That would be really nice. But we very often see them colored, so you may have to just put something on this, decorate it with lace or whatever, depending on how you want to do that. Okay, now, let's think a little bit about what we're going to tie our box with. I find that particularly for packages, which I'm going to mail, I really like yarn, and if you're a knitter, you might have some leftover yarns. Here's a fairly fat yarn. This is synthetic yarn, so it doesn't break real easily.

This is a rug yarn in red. Here's some blue that you might want to use doubled so that it was thicker. Here's some that had already been tied, and I just cut this off of a box that I'd had. It's red and green together, and you can use several strands, makes a fat piece, and looks pretty nice. If you don't have that, how about some rick rack? This is some colored rick rack that has several different colors in it. You can wrap that around your box, tie it on the top, or we'll do this real quickly. You'll notice I haven't covered this box. This is a nice little white box that you could use without anything on it, but sometimes we don't have boxes like that. I usually use boxes. Something else came in. You can tie it with the rick rack and you can use any color, and it makes a very nice type of a ribbon. If you have leftover rick rack,

you might want to try that. Something else you might want to use for ties of shoelace. Here's a pair of shoelaces, and if you're giving something that might be for a runner or a basketball player, who needs shoelaces every once in a while, put one inside the package, and use the other one, particularly those for athletic shoes are very long, and they would make a very nice tie around the box. So look into shoelaces. You might even have some around the house, but I really do like the yarns. This is a commercial yarn made for wrapping packages. It's quite thick, and this is why when you use your home knitting yarns, you may want to put two or three together to make a thicker piece. Now we'll move those aside. If you're really in trouble, you can use string. This is just plain old string, or crochet cotton. This is what's called pearl cotton, and we use small pieces of this for very small packages, or this is the kind of thing that you can use

when you're, say, hanging up your little cornucopia here. And it's good for that. It's not thick and fat, but it's very strong, and it will hold up your package. Another thing that you might have around the house is some little doilies, not everybody does, but you can find them, and you can also use these to put on packages. This is something that you could just put right on the top of a package, and perhaps put a seal in the middle, or again, you could fold it and use the lace around the outside. But little lace doilies and they come gold too, so if you happen to have some gold ones, you can use that. Now you may have just plain pieces of paper, and this is tissue paper, or you may only have plain old white wrapping paper, or even brown wrapping paper, and you want to decorate that paper because you really need, or you feel you need something that's more interesting.

So one of the fun ways that we can do that is to use a food coloring and water, and we can sort of print the paper. Now I'm putting red food coloring in here, and a little bit of water, to make it, don't get this on you when it's so concentrated, because it's hard to get it off. And I'm going to put in just a little dab of vinegar, because the vinegar helps the color to stay. Now, I'll take a piece of this white paper, and I'm going to cut a small piece off of it because it's easier to work with, but if you were going to do one at home, you'd want to have a large piece. And then I have a sponge here, and this is just a plain old sponge that I might use at the sink, and I'm going to cut a piece off of it.

Now, I'm not going to make any decorative shape with this particular sponge, because I'm not going to take the time to cut it into a Christmas tree or something of that sort, which you could do. Now, you may want to get your sponge wet ahead of time, so it sort of soaks up in his damp. Then stick it into the dye, and then you can put it on the paper. Now, this paper, you'll have to let it dry, because this paper is sort of slippery on the outside. Now, that isn't a very fancy picture. You could cut the sponge into Christmas trees, or whatever it is that you'd like to cut it into. But you can also do this on tissue paper, and tissue paper being thinner will soak up the color a little bit better. Now, I'm going to use this folded, same picture. You don't get the pretty decorations, but you get lots of red spots,

because the tissue paper soaks it up so much faster, that if you just put it on, you see you'll get red spots. Doesn't work quite as well on the tissue paper, as it does on the white paper. I'm going to set this down here, otherwise we'll have paint all over everything. Now, you can also do this on the brown paper, and we'll cut off a piece of brown paper since this is sort of big. An experiment with this, you know, maybe you don't want quite so much dye on the sponge. And use a stamp pad if you'd like to try that. But you can take this set of the side, let it dry, and then you will have those decorations on your paper. Now, something else that you can do with the tissue paper that works better than the sponge, even,

is to fold your paper so you have a corner, say in the center or something. Stick that into your color, and then sort of make sure that all of it gets the extra drops off. And then you can open it out, and you'll get a design in the middle. Now, we have almost too much liquid on this. But you see, you can make designs and by folding your paper in a variety of places, and then hanging it up, letting it dry, you can have designs all over your paper. If I folded it in all of these corners, then I can get a whole lot of different designs, or I can drop the paint or the food coloring onto it. You could also use temperate paints,

and that would work too. Another thing that you might try is a piece of paper towel. And this is just some white paper tiling, and I'll just show you. And the paper tiling also will pick up the color pretty quickly. Now, to help, so the color doesn't run all over, you can take other paper tiling, and sort of use it as a blotter. But you see, you still get your color dot in the center of your paper, and of course, by doing that in a whole lot of places, you can experiment with it. This is fairly liquid because I've got water in with it, but if you use a temperate paint, and I can see that on my paper, the paint is starting to dry. Now, if you have some paper and some fabric squares, you might like to try something else.

Before we go on with something besides the painting, if you have some corks, you can cut your design out of cork also, and it will also make a good printer, and you get an interesting design from the cork, because it has holes in it and can be used. So look around for the different kinds of things that you can use for printing. Now, here's something else you might try if you have what I'm looking for here. Okay, this is the polyester web that will melt, and you can fasten fabric onto something, or you can fasten pieces of fabric together. The only thing you have to be careful with this is that you don't get this on the bottom of your iron. But if you want to make some type of a patchwork quilt,

and I'm just putting these on here with no design at all, you can press this, and you really need to use some steam, even though I don't have the steam in here. Follow the directions, but you can press this right onto the paper, and the fabric will stay on there after it cools, and you can make a whole patchwork design. Or you can press the pieces of fabric together and make a patchwork design. So you might try that if you have lots of little scraps of fabric, and you want to use them up. Try the fusible web and putting them together so that you have that kind of a covering. Now, the very last thing that I'd like to show you that is one of my favorites for a large box, I have a large box down here. Suppose you have a box like this, or you have your child's sled or whatever it is in it, and there's no way in the world you can find a piece of paper,

big enough to cover this up and you want to wrap it. Try some newspaper. You may think, oh, but a crazy thing, but you can make very pretty raffings with newspaper. Cover your box with newspaper, maybe not one with a big picture on it so much, but where there's lots of news, and then use bright red ribbon on it and the yarn. And if you have several boxes tied like this, you'll find that the red and the black go together real nicely. It's real inexpensive. The kids rip it off and throw it away anyway, so why spend a whole lot on fancy rapping paper? Newspaper will work just great, and you can paste pretty pictures on it too from magazines if that's what you want to do. Now, these are just a few ideas of things that you can use when I didn't mention too as aluminum foil right out of your kitchen, very good to wrap around things that are all shaped in funny shapes.

But go ahead and look around your house, look for those things you already have that are inexpensive and make your own rapping supplies. You'll have a lot of fun and you'll save some money. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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