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Brilliant gift wrapping needn’t take long and needn’t be expensive. It is a great way to get a wide age range of kids involved and focused on a project, especially if they have a goal and a particular gift in mind.

If you plan to make a habit of making gift wrap then you should invest in a flip chart refill – lots of large sheets of white crispy paper, at a really reasonable price.

Meanwhile, suppose, just suppose… Christmas has crept up on you and you have run out of time to make a collection of homemade gifts… but you still want your gifts to at least look like your kids partook in the process, well now is the time: Glorious Gift Wrapping.

Se7en Gift Wrap Ideas:

• Bleach on tissue paper: This is so easy and so beautiful and so effective. If you take nothing else from this post take this…
  

  You will need some bleach, something to stamp with and a pile of tissue paper. (I only did this with my older kids, I couldn’t trust the little ones to be totally safe with bleach). We used a potato print, but anything stampable will do. It works like magic: It looks like you are stamping with nothing, and looks like nothing is happening:

  

  But just give the bleach a moment and suddenly you have masses of wild batik looking papers… I hung them on the clothes rack to dry and they dried really quickly.

  

  You need to make this paper way in advance – so the smell of bleach can wear off – if you do this the night before Christmas your gifts will smell horribly clean! The bleach smell wears off after a couple of days – so don’t worry too much about it. Apart from gift wrap this makes beautiful window coverings, the light shines through very prettily – we had it up between us and a pokey neighbor for years!

• Bright Acrylics: One of our Tuesday Art Tasks recently was: Eric Carle’s Radical Rockets… and I let them paint paper until they couldn’t want to anymore, actually until we ran out of surfaces and there were absolutely no more flat surfaces in the house – I think given the chance they may have painted all week.

  

  

• Blow Painting: I couldn’t find straws – hmmm hijacked for some scientific discovery – so we just blew away. We used food coloring (a lot cheaper than ink) and off they went… fun and renders short people quite breathless.

  


• Potato Printing: This is so easy and quick, we used acrylic paints, which are always bright and shiny. Have a look here for clear crisp potato print tips. These are also great for scattering glitter on before the paint dries.

  


• Finger Painting: Firstly you will need finger paints. So make some! Plop great globs onto the paper and let them go. If you want the colors to stay crisp and clear then let the paint dry between colors, but if you are dashing then strictly fingertips!

  

  Now our papers were really wet, so I just placed another layer of paper on top and printed a second sheet, as we gently pried the papers apart again.

  

  

• Ink on Crayon Painting: This is so easy and so effective… and really there is nothing to explain! We did our rubbings on the floor boards!

  

  

• Stickers:Kids love stickers and they are really easy to make. You need some plain stickers, I buy a whole selection of different shapes and sizes from the office supply store. Add markers and off you go. I give every one a couple of stickers at the table while they wait for supper. Before you blink an eye, after a couple of evenings of industry you will have a whole collection of very useful stickers.

  

  

I know I have a larger than average work force… but just a little effort every evening adds up to a large stock of gift wrap. The next post in this section is all about packaging…

Happy Wrapping!

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