Fancy Eco-Wrapping
By Karina | November 9, 2009
It’s still pretty early for this discussion, but with all things green, if you want to tread lightly during the holiday season you need to start a little earlier than you would otherwise.
So - how about getting started by collecting the materials you’ll need for gorgeous eco-friendly packaging of your gorgeous gifts? After all, we stand behind our Easy Peasy Tips with lots of support. Here’s a few things you might want to stock up on, so you’re not in a last minute scramble to make a gift wrap that you can feel good about:
- Furoshiki is the Japanese art of wrapping gifts in fabric - how about stopping by a thrift store or a estate sale to find some gorgeous vintage linens or sheets? You can also go through your own fabric stash (what, you don’t have one?) and choose some fabrics that were eye-catching enough to buy, but maybe a little TOO eye-catching to use.
- If you’ve got a favorite reusable bag and you know your recipient perhaps doesn’t have a bunch of them, pick up extra ones to wrap your present in! After they open their surprise they’ll have a gift that keeps on giving. I did this last year, and while I could have dressed up the packages a little more with ribbon, certainly no one complained. (I have a polite family!)
- This tutorial [via lifehacker] for making a gorgeous bow from magazine pages is AMAZING. it’s so simple, too! and many of us have a stack of magazines lying around waiting to be recycled or passed along to friends. If you don’t have any, stop by your doctors office or local hair salon and see if they’ve got any ancient magazine issues lying around in the waiting room that you can take off of their hands.
- The tutorial above mentions also using ANY fancy paper - such as street maps - to make bows. My fanciest wrapping job ever was for a bridal shower: I used nautical maps that had been discarded from my job to wrap up the gifts, and it was a big hit. So keep your eyes open and stock up with these materials!
- There are a few more options here, in a Q&A we wrote up a while ago.
Of course the most ecological gift will be wrapped in nothing at all - so if you’d like, pursue instead gifts which give back - we’ve covered a few options here and here.
What’s your favorite light-on-the-planet method to wrap gifts?
[[Photo from flickr user Siel, aka greenlagirl via creative commons license - is not just a great photographer, but also an awesome blogger and who covered this topic from a last-minute angle a couple of years ago!]]
Related posts:
- Easy Peasy Tip: Waste-free Wrapping!
- Easy Peasy Tip: Save The Wrapping!
- Tiny Choices Q&A: Gift Wrap?
- Easy Peasy Tip: Creatively Wrap!
- Simply your Holidays
- Fancy Eco-efficient Lighting
- Recycling Packing Materials
Topics: Crafts/DIY, Waste |
[…] Fancy Eco-Wrapping | Tiny Choices tinychoices.com/2009/11/09/fancy-eco-wrapping – view page – cached It’s still pretty early for this discussion, but with all things green, if you want to tread lightly during the holiday season you need to start a little […]
I pick up beautiful scarves all year long whenever I see them at the Goodwill, then wrap presents in them, tying them with a fabric ribbon. The whole thing is reusable and the scarf becomes part of the gift, either for wearing or just for wrapping a gift of their own in. I think they look beautiful, way classier than using paper, and I really barely spend anything on it.
The last gift we wrapped was in a NYC subway map. I move around *a lot* and I keep picking up maps - road map, bike maps & bus maps - that I have no use for once I leave, so they go into the craft box for future use.
I’m ignoring the question of whether I should be picking up these maps to begin with though I could probably make a pretty good argument that driving around lost uses too much gas and having reliable bike& bus maps reduce my car use.
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