Author: johN1Boak

I had saved an appealing plastic box that once held a new pen.  It was a sleeve, patterned and textured, which held a two-piece black foam container. Too beautiful to throw away.

There is a burden to saving beautiful packaging. It can consume space. Caution is advised. But the payoff comes when you have just the right thing for a quick wrap.

All I had to do here, after inserting the gift, was to wind some ribbon around the box. In this instance I used a shiny copper mylar ribbon. I wrapped in a purposely irregular fashion. The criss crossing providing a casual contrast to the very polished, dark, industrial materials.

The end result was a handsome small package with a sophisticated feel.

When I ran out of tube-shaped boxes to wrap a bunch of gift beers, I placed the last one in a smallish FedEx box and reached for a large piece of brown wrapping paper. This paper was salvaged from an exceptionally large shopping-bag from a franchise bakery’s catering service.

Once I saw that the orange band split the face of the package in half, I decided to run with the idea of a face. I took some scraps from black meat-tray foam and cut them into the pieces you see here.

I reached into my box of plastic bottle/carton caps and took two black caps for the eyes.

I sliced up a white food-take-out box to get the foam for the hair and teeth. The hair piece had an angle already molded into it, that would make it easy to glue on top of the wrap. I simply cut the overall rectangle shape and then sliced out the gaps to make the hair. The teeth were made from the scraps.

I tried a variety of ways of depicting the mouth, including two rows of teeth, and curved top and bottom borders for the teeth. But that greater realistic detail destroyed the iconic power of the four abstract teeth.

I would like to sing the praises of food-packing foam. It is an incredibly easy medium with which to sculpt shapes. It is too flimsy to be enduring in regular art objects; but that is not a problem in the highly-transient forms of wrap art. I cut it with a matte knife. Many cutters will work.

I enjoyed this mask-like design. It was second face wrap I did this season. The faces reach out strongly in a community of wrapped gifts.

I was giving a present to a young man who likes animals and nature, so I decided to work with the contrast between natural materials and industrial materials.

I glued the gift inside two black foam meat-packing trays. I glued some thick cloth ribbon around the edge where the two trays join.

The fan of woodpecker feathers was actually salvaged from a wrap I executed a number of years ago. It was lying in the bottom of a box a miscellaneous wrapping resources.

An angled strip of gold ribbon added a flashy reference to traditional ribbon. It also has a shiny quality similar to the black foam itself; that commonality helps transform the foam from trash to lovely new material.

Lastly, I reached into my box of aspen scraps left over from sculptural work. I wrote the recipient’s name on a chip and glued it onto the wrap.

The result is a wrap with a richness of materials and texture, almost all of them unexpected in wrapping, but with a very warm effect.

We are about to head up into the mountains for a family get-together, and so a little more wrapping was in order. The wassail’s bottle suggested tube wraps.

I took two pieces of fine corrugated cardboard packing material and joined them into one. That completely covered a bottle of fancy beer. I made a bottom for this improvised tube and hot-glued it in place.

I then discovered that a plug of aspen log lying on my floor just happened to fit in the tube. I made some little stop-guides out of carboard and glued them just inside the top of the tube. The aspen “cork” then fit perfectly and did not slide down in and hide its beautiful sides.

I glued some foil paper on top and also glued on a red snow-flake that I had salvaged from a holiday invitation. Next I added the purple ribbon, since the cardboard and the aspen were so closely related in color, if not in texture. The extra ribbon under the round white label completed the wrap.

In went the bottle. I lightly glued the cork in place.

As a member of the Colorado Yale Association Service Group I went to a  wrapping session at Florence Crittenton High School. The school serves young single mom’s.  In a unique collaboration with Denver Public Schools, Crittenton Services helps teen mothers stay in school and graduate, give birth to healthy babies, learn how to be nurturing mothers, pursue post-secondary education and acquire marketable job skills.

We were wrapping batches of five gifts targeted for a given student and her child: clothes, diapers, toys and supplies.

The stuffed animals were not in boxes. A volunteer offered me a tattered old box. It was small. Though I could have squeezed this  giraffe (with inner music box) into the box, my own child mind balked at the brutality of such stuffing. So I cut half-moon holes into the flaps of the box and enclosed the giraffe with the head happily emerging.

I then wrapped the box in a simple suit of red holiday paper, using a central folded-edge band to cover the join. I also made a collar to help the giraffe keep its chin up, to enhance it’s sculptural spirit.

I have played with exposing the gift in some semi-transparent wraps, but this is the first time I have let the gift out of the bag. It felt like a breakthrough wrap, a revelation to me and to the eventual recipient.

Plus the giraffe was clearly so eager to meet its new child, an idea perfectly in keeping with the spirit of Christmas.

I have included a detail image of the giraffe’s whole group of five wraps: a cow wrap, a two-piece wrap in foil with ribbon, an improvised triangle box with a simple band wrap, the giraffe, and soda-bottle pineapple wrap.