Creative holiday gift wrapping

In my creative holiday gift wrapping, everything I used comes from nature, almost.  The jingle bells, and wire basket not so much.  I love the look of the brown kraft paper and kraft bags.  Using some vintage music paper to wrap with is really special when your wrapping for a music lover.  Now, I didn’t use any this go around, but the newspaper would also be a great use for creative gift wrapping.  I also love the natural colored woven wicker type baskets as well or vintage baskets and vintage tins.

The Paper

To begin I take a piece of butcher paper or Kraft paper and India ink and/or acrylic ink, I’ve used a handmade brush I made for mark making and I’ve also used a piece of mulch I just picked up off the ground.   I dipped the item in the ink then splattered it and dragged it across the paper, dabbed it, swirled, etc.  There is literally no wrong way to do this.  Once dry, I cut a long strip for a belly band for my large box and smaller strips for smaller packages and gift bags that I had wrapped in brown kraft paper or used a brown kraft bag for the creative holiday gift wrapping.

Using found items from nature

Then out to my yard, I collected pine cones, snippets of greenery from different bushes, and a couple of clippings from my pine trees.  Now, the pine cones were wet and tightly closed, so I set them on my furnace vent to dry out and they opened right up!

There are more than plenty of pine cones in my yard.  I literally cleaned up three garbage cans full of pine cones this fall and they are still falling.  There are only two pine trees but, they are also ninety years old!  My house is a little Sears and Roebuck Cottage from the 1920s.  The old lady that had the house built (picked out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog) … these were her first two Christmas trees!  These trees are ginormous!  They far exceed the size of my house!   But thank goodness they are healthy and just beautiful.  Ok, I got a little sided tracked.  Can you say “squirrel”?  Back to the creative gift wrapping.

I also snipped these beautiful red berries from a plant that I have no clue as to what is.  Here comes another squirrel.  I picked up three sickly-looking plants at Lowes after a late spring frost 4 years ago.  They were on clearance and thought, what the heck, let’s see what happens.  Three years later they produced these beautiful red berries in the fall.  I just love these bushes.  My Un-named berry bush. Below is a photo of it.  Does anyone know what it's called? I would love to know.

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I hope you all have a lovely holiday season. 🌲

OX, Janné