When I graduated from high school, I got my dream job, a shopgirl at Hawaii’s favorite department store, Liberty House. When the holiday season rolled around, I was assigned to the perfume bar. To my dismay, I found not only did I sell perfume but that I also had to wrap it! I didn’t know how to wrap presents. The saleswoman before me stayed a bit longer than her shift to teach me how to wrap. I have never forgotten her generosity and kindness. Now I adore wrapping and have been known to go a little over the top. I used to keep a huge stash of ornaments, trinkets and toys to attach to metallic and ornate wire ribbon and used the best quality wrapping paper. This year, I decided to do something different, natural and simple.
We have our holiday lunch celebration at the office today and the team doesn’t exchange gifts. However, I do like to give a stocking stuffer, Hawaiian salt or yummy snacks as a token of my appreciation. I bought this snowflake paper punch at Ben Franklin and it’s fantastic. I can’t wait to add a few more to my collection but at $20+ a pop, I’ll take my time with that, one lovely punch at a time.
Shipping tags, found in the packaging section of Office Max, have a simple, natural and retro look. I can use both the tag and the snowflake punches. The snowflakes would make a nice garland or would look great glued in a scattered way onto wrapping paper. Or how about as giant snowflake confetti on a table?
These little bowls were made by Maui potter, Valerie Mizner. She had a booth at the Waldorf Holiday Faire and all of her work was incredible; with pretty color combinations and organic shapes. The bowls are the perfect size to store paper clips on a desktop or as a ring holder on a nightstand. I added a few Lindt truffles and tied everything up with purple raffia ribbon.
If you visit my home, you’ll see neatly stacked fashion and design magazines several feet high. I am constantly flipping through mags and ripping out pages because the image or article inspired me, the color composition was appealing or the styling of the shot unique. I decided to reuse some of these fashion magazine pages that bring a smile to my face as wrapping. These MauiDiveGirl bracelets and pretty oyster shell tray were packaged within the pages of a makeup editorial. The two pages shown here will make a cool graphic and colorful wrapping for a future gift. Since magazine pages are quite thin, it was easy to bend and patch together several different pages to cover the entire box.
I would love to hear your ideas for wrapping with reused materials or how you make your gifts unique.
If you enjoyed the reuse of fashion mags, you may also like this…Tiffanie, from corner blog, made pretty gift tags by reusing store shopping bags.
All magazine images shown above (including as gift wrap) are from the December 2011 issue of Marie Claire.
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Tan,
Love the idea of using shipping tags to make xmas labels. I wish this was posted the week before! I just bought more labels because I ran out. I will definitely add the paper punch, shipping tags & xmas stickers to my Christmas next year.
BTW, I’m really thinking of buying that Maui silhouette necklace you mentioned in another blog…Maui girl in New York. Can’t remember the name.
Merry Christmas!
I haven’t bought paper punches in years but have been feeling more like getting into paper crafts again. When I went to Ben Franklin, my mouth dropped open because the stuff available now is so cool, especially the Martha Stewart punches. More expensive than before but the quality is so much better now too. There are these border punches that you might like also, I bought a polka dot one but there are a ton of choices (look on Amazon if it’s not in your craft store).
The jewelry designer is Tiffany Chou, I’d like to do a feature post on her next year too.
Miss you and love you…take care.
Tania! I love these! One of those “why didn’t I think of that!?” moments!
And of course, thank you so much for the link back to my post. I am getting to that Liebster Award post right after Christmas, I want to share the love! xoxo
Thank you Tiffanie! I loved your post today too…such a great idea to reuse a pretty sheet.
I knew this was going to be a great post! Gift wrapping by Maui Shop Girl – oh yah! Really well done – just beautiful! I am so inspired! Thanks
Thank you Ann for the kind words. I was worried about the photos, had to take them at night in bad lighting but really wanted to share some of the ideas I came up with this year.
(This is about as crafty as I get…if it doesn’t involve paper, I’ve got two left hands.)
This is all sorts of awesome, thanks for sharing lady!
Thank you!
Every year I say I’m going to do better about wrapping gifts beautifully and every year I totally FAIL. This year, at least, I bought metallic paper, but only because I didn’t want to repeat last year’s butcher-paper-and-green-ribbon theme. (That roll of butcher paper is going to last a lifetime!)
I saw (somewhere) the idea to wrap crepe paper several times around a plain colored (or white or kraft brown) wrapped gift and top it with an adhesive tag. Running one of those snowflakes through a Xyron machine would do the trick (as would a glue stick) and make a beautiful presentation! Maybe the snowflake punches will be on sale after Christmas.
Inspiring post … thanks so much. I’m using Pinterest to collect ideas for future gift-giving occasions. Now I just need to remember to look at my Pinterest boards! =)
That sounds like a cute idea Debbi! Thanks for stopping by and the kind words.
I think you could definitely do something with the butcher paper too. I didn’t buy any holiday wrap this year, I have maybe one roll of a black and white print from last year and a roll of Kraft paper. I’ve got a small space so trying to think of creative ways to avoid taking up a lot of space with wrapping stuff, limited myself to one little umbrella holder’s worth.
Isn’t Pinterest the bomb? Such great ideas on there.
I absolutely love your blog and this post is an example why! I have sooo many magazine and those pattern scissors, we should totally get together and get crafty one day. Between podcasts of course! Happy Holidays!
Thank you so much Aimee! Yes…a paper crafts get together sounds awesome
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