DIY: Better ideas for homemade wrapping paper
Posted
Nov 07 2008, 05:28 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Sure, you can recycle the Sunday color funnies as gift wrap to save money. But Kelly at Almost Frugal and her readers came up with much more creative alternatives to that tired idea.
Use old maps. Imprint your baby's footprint on newsprint. Decorate paper bags with stamps cut from potatoes and dipped in tempera paint. Give the kids crayons or paint and turn them loose on plain paper.
Reader Laina takes the homemade approach a step further and in the process turns wrapping paper into very personal gifts.
Laina customizes plain paper each year with photos and drawings that illustrate a story about the recipient. She explained: "For instance we drew a plane and put a (picture) of the grandparents inside and cut out paper Santa hats to glue on top of them, then had them dropping gifts out."
She's also the source of the baby footprint idea -- she did it for her child's first Christmas -- and also offered this: "My best idea for Christmas was writing Christmas memory stories and adding little drawings or pictures in with the text."
Some readers recycle gift bags and wrapping paper from year to year. In Vintage Mommy's family, it's a longstanding tradition. She said, "Some of the paper -- which travels back and forth across the country -- has been around for ages, and it's a fun way to remember holidays gone by as we open gifts wrapped in our 'heirloom' paper."
