DIY GIFT WRAP TUTORIAL

Guys! GUYS. How was your weekend?

Mine was super awesome, and I got to see family and go to classical concerts and stuff my mouth full of Italian food the entire weekend. We even got a little shopping in...not grocery shopping this time. I'm sure you can imagine, but I was literally squeaking like a parrot when I excited realized that shoes at my favorite store were 80% OFF. I was waling on clouds in that store.

Now, here I am typing this at midnight, because I'm overly excited again. You remember when I said I was going to start doing more tutorials? You know, like this one that still has yet to be finished?? :/ I'm thinking that future tutorials that deal with technical issues would be better suited for a video format...which I plan to do instead in the future. Thoughts on that?

I finally did another tutorial, and I'm also managing to save the environment one bag at a time.

Do you want to make pretty gifts that look the part while patting yourself on the bag for being resourceful? Follow me...

I can't tell you how much I love, love, LOVE this paper!!! Read more to see where it's from and what almost happened to it before my cranium lightbulb went off.

So yes, this pretty, thick, luxurious gold paper is from a restaurant bag for my husband's and my date leftovers when we went downtown to an incredible restaurant downtown. We were just meeting there after work before a function downtown, and we definitely weren't prepared for such a nice restaurant. Note to self: never wear jeans to this place again. Ever, Again. Say yes to the dress next time.

Anyway, this poor fellow ended up in our garage with stuff overflowing in it meant to go off to Goodwill, and after running through ideas about how to wrap presents in different ways than last year, I thought I should try reusing pretty bags like this. So, of course I threw out its contents into a different, less worthy plastic bag and lovingly took the gold bag back inside.

Enough blabbering. You can choose whatever decor you'd like to top your gift wrap off with, and I chose little fake berries and green twig things from the craft store. I've had these babies since last year, so I'm working on using them up.

See what I mean? Not really even my style when you see the full view, but you can cut up and glue things as much as you want to get your finished look.

You can choose to cut the bag any way you want, depending on if you want the logo or design to show (such as cute illustrations on fashion bags), but I didn't want the logo to show in this case. I actually decided to save the upper portion for another project (i.e. making the handles into bows, using the white side of the bag for another gift, etc).

Follow le steps, as shown above: cut, wrap, position and place. I used a good old glue gun to get my goods on the package.

Stop right there! I already know that you're about to sweep your remnants into the trash, but don't even think about it. Reduce, reuse, recycle! I'm transforming this little scrap shown above into a pretty little tag, which unfortunately didn't work well with my pen AT ALL. Ah, well...I'll just add another tiny tag underneath it to add the recipient's name.

Kindly disregard my semi-smudgy tag, which had a name written on it for all of one whole minute. This paper is durable, that's for sure!

This little guy is sitting under our tree at the momentum, happily soaking up the Christmas lights.

Any cool ideas too add for creating recycled wrapping paper? I'd love to hear, especially since I'm on my gift craze. :) Sooo many things to wrap!

Happy Monday!