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Red-Rocker Wrap

I have put legs on my packages before. But I had not tried rockers. These red ones are saved from those cylindrical boxes that some raisins use. They are small and thus require a very small package. And the package itself requires that some weight be added inside to the bottom of the package, so that the wrap actually rocks instead of just falling over. The rectangular cut out area in the lids must extend below the center of the circles.

The wrap on the little box started out with some red-foil holiday paper. But there was not enough contrast with the lids. I folded two magazine-page bands and wrapped them around the original wrap, leaving some of the foil paper peeking out. I hot-glued the red lids onto the bottom and sides of the wrap.

When I was done with that, I felt that the spots where the circle reached the top of the wrap needed punctuation, so I then glued on small gold bows. Last of all I added gold bows to the ends of the wrap.

I plan to find two matching lids with a larger radius and carry on my experiments in rocker wrapping.

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Band Wrap on Yellow

The base of this wrap is a piece of marketing literature, a glossy yellow flyer with minimal type. It did not cover the whole gift, so I grabbed another sheet of paper. It had low contrast in color (dull diminished yellow) but high contrast in surface (no glass, uncoated, some texture).

Three of the bands were made from pages of a glossy newspaper supplement which features expensive watches and glamorous fashion. The fourth band is red recycled christmas wrap.

The label is hand-written right on the base wrap.

This wrap is a good example of elegance achieved in a quick and easy wrap.

For a tutorial on band wrap, click here.

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Silver Shopping-bag Band Wrap

Shopping-bag paper is often a thick and luxurious substance. It can be hard to wrangle into submission. But the paper is so beautiful it is hard to resist whatever challenges it throws one’s way.

This particular bag had enough dings and wrinkles that it was not suitable for an outright one-piece wrap. The solution to overcoming it’s surface complexity was to create a wrap with an even-more complex surface. So I cut the bag  into strips and made folded-edge wrapping bands.

I did not want to wrap the ends with the thick paper, so I selected a blue tissue paper and capped the ends. Then I added successive silver bands to wrap the gift. I was aware of the white Optima letters from the bag’s logotype, making them into decorative trim, taking advantage of Hermann Zapf’s beautiful curves.

I finished the wrap with a silver cap-bow.

This is my first band wrap using one-color bands. The finished effect reminds me of the titanium-paneled building surfaces of Frank Ghery and Daniel libeskind.

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Cross Bands on Blue Mylar

Reining in my proclivity for innovative wraps and cleaving toward the practical in the waning hours before Christmas, I made this little wrap.

It brings together two scraps I wanted to use. The first was a piece of foil wrapping paper with Santa Claus medallions. I made one wide band, folded its edges to make a ribbon-like band. I cut it into three pieces: two for a criss-cross ribbon and one little piece to roll into the “bow.”

Rifling through my wrap scrap drawer I had come across a sheet of thin blue mylar with holographic swirls built into it. I had already used it to make a toy-car wrap. Now these two papers, Santas and the blue mylar, while both reflective, were different in their visual detail, and made such a good team.

I wrapped the box in the blue, taped on the ribbon bands, and had a great wrap in the traditional cross style.

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Dark Bands

Band-wrap collage produces improvised designs of rewarding complexity. While I do permit myself some level of choice in the printed materials I cut into strips to make the bands, I do not linger long on those choices. At this time of year I wrap faster and faster.

Thus the process of making band wraps allows me to become a captive viewer, as I feverishly pursue my craft, of the new hitherto unseen visual improvisation that is occurring in my studio.

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Car Wrap

Toys are ubiquitous at Christmas. Why not a wrap that aspires to be a toy? Such are the thoughts a wrap artist may be driven to entertain on the 23rd of December.

I used a shiny blue mylar with built-in swirly pattern. The wheels are aerosol-can lids. I used pieces of corrugated box to make special gluing hardware whose job it was to make the lids attach to the thin and flexible mylar.

The windshield is made of soda-bottle scrap. Red chenille wires outline the windshield and passenger compartment, and make the steering wheel.

The bumpers, grill and headlights are made of fragments of a silvery shopping-bag paper.

The “C” on the hood is the present’s label.

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Recycled-shopping-bag Band Wrap

I thought I might veer away from my recent fascination with discarded packaging materials and return to wrapping with paper.

Shopping bags offer some of the most amazing paper around, and it often gets discarded. I get some of my best ones from my alley dumpster. I took a red one from our supply and cut it apart apart to wrap the thin box pf this gift.

One half of the bag covered the gift. I sealed it on the back with hot glue. I then sealed both ends without trying to bend or fold the stiff paper. I snipped those glued ends to give them a precise and common edge. Then I folded them over onto the bag and glued them down.

Of course, rendered shopping bags do have their surface flaws. At this point in the wrap I had a major retailer’s elegant type crossing my wrap. Parallel to that was a crease from the lower edge of the bag. And last of all I had a neat round hole left over from the bag-handle strings.

So, I cut strips of red paper from the remaining bag fragment, and folded their edges over to make puffy wrapper’s bands. I cover the typography and the crease with two horizontal bands, gluing them to the back. I cover the bag handle hole at the top of the wrap with the third band. I placed it at an angle to make the wrap more dynamic.

I spent a bit of time looking for ribbons to add some complexity to the texture of the wrap. I settled on two pieces, a dark green horizontal to fulfill the Christmas color dyad, and then a red ribbon with a darker red velvet center and white dashes along the edge.

I labelled it freehand using a black marker.

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Spiral-binder Cat’s Toy Wrap

Jan is our neighbor. She made this delightful and thoughtful wrap for our cat. The very small box contains a weight. Three document-binder coils form the attraction and action of this feline toy.

I am grateful to Jan both for the toy and also for her creative expansion of the boundaries of wrapping: wrap for other species, wrap that need not be unwrapped, and wrap that is an  active-sculpture toy.

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Blue-Jean Wrap

I have seen some elegant wraps using cloth. It occurred to me that I could dig into my cloth scraps and come up with something different. Imagine my delight when  blue-jean scraps turned up.

I cut up an old pair of jeans to fit around half of the chosen box. Then I could begin to see the upper half as a shirt; digging deeper in same cloth box I found some of Linda’s old silk trousers. A little bit of matte-knife work and I had the second half of the wrap.

I  wrapped the gift’s box in rough paper. Then I began gluing the silk onto that underwrap, using fiber tape on the backside to pull and arrange the silk. Then I glued the jeans onto the box. It is messy on the backside but the front was tight.

I reached into the ribbon box and found the read and gold ribbon for the belt. And I went into the recycled bow box and found the red-green mylar bow. The name tag was a simple rectangle of paper, tucked into the jeans pocket.

Linda said it looked a bit weird. I thought it just looked silly. But it does have sculptural impact. I have strayed fairly far away from wrap traditions with this truncated human form. Let me know what you think.

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Tinsel Beard

I have always been challenged when it comes to tinsel. As a child I led the opposition to tinsel on the grounds that it was just too messy. But some friends recently bequeathed me their supply of tinsel. I vowed that I would make my peace with it by finding a way to incorporate it into wrapping.

If  you like a neat and orderly wrapping table this is not the wrap for you. But, as you can see, I did find a way to apply used tinsel to a gift wrap.

First I wrapped the box in a piece of yellow paper that came from a direct-mail piece. Then I pulled out a batch of tinsel from one large ball that was part of my tinsel inheritance. I shook it out to give it a mostly vertical alignment. With my left hand I applied a strip of hot glue along the top of the wrapped box. I then placed the top edge of the tinsel onto the hot glue.

I then took a small strip of scrap paper, applied glue to it and then placed it on top of the tinsel in alignment with the underlying first band of glue. I pressed down to fix the tinsel in place.

With scissors, I made a preliminary trim of the lower end of the tinsel. Then I followed the above procedures to attach more and more tinsel around the wrap.

Next I took a piece of red-foil paper, gave it one folded edge where it would overlay the tinsel, and wrapped it around the top of the box using both glue and tape. I shook out the wrap to get red of loose tinsel. Grabbing my scissors I gave the wrap a tonsorial trim.

I folded some gold paper, rubbed on white dry-transfer letters for recipient initials.

Then I got out the shop vac and cleaned up the tinsel that littered my studio.

This wrap is very dynamic and silly when handled.