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Little Holiday Lights

I was in a gift shop in Leadville over Thanksgiving. I saw some Christmas-lights necklaces for sale, and took the uncommon tactic (for Wrap Art) of buying wrap-art supplies.

What I had not expected was how difficult it was to turn this idea into a practical wrap. My first effort led to the black wine-bumper wrap that I made two posts back. That dark wrap simply looked better without the lights.

So this time I tried placing them on a plain white wrap. Indeed they looked much better. The lights are complicated visually: the contrast between the lights that light up and those that do not demanded the simple, bright background.

But the next problem was how to place them. I tried a system of four rows of six lights, but the fact that the necklace is a closed circle not a finite line made it very difficult to figure a path for the wire. I undid the hot-glued lights and placed another layer of white paper on the wrap. Then I pursued my final design, a meandering placement.

The little switch and battery case is hiding on a side of the wrap.

Some wraps go together with the greatest of ease. Others are full of surprises and obstructions in the path to completion. This simple idea was not simple in execution.

Once completed, however, this little wrap has a delightful power when placed into a group of gifts; the blinking lights are visually insistent.

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Pine Cone Christmas Wrap

I was hiking in the foothills yesterday and noticed small pine cones that resembled both little pineapples and Christmas trees. It seemed they might be useful for wraps. So I gathered a number of them over the course of the hike. My left cargo pocket was so full the cones began to poke my leg.

This morning I took the cones and cut them in half on my scroll saw. Then I fired up my airbrushes and gave them some quick coloring: green on the left and red on the right.

The next step was to determine what was the best background paper to show the cone-trees. I had imagined it would be plain white. But a large remaining piece of shiny black shopping bag turned out to be the best. I used hot glue to seal up the black paper, which is very thick, needs to be fixed firmly, and does not look particularly good with lots of tape.

I then glued on the cones. The resulting wrap has a subdued holiday look, with dimensional richness.

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Sliced-Box Tree with Wine-Bottle Bumper

In keeping with my fascination for cubist ideas, I took a small flat box of long proportion and drew a line from one corner to its opposite corner. I then placed the box on the table of my scroll saw and cut the box in half. By rotating one of the halves and joining it to the other with two pieces of tape, applied to the pointiest ends, I had a box shaped like a christmas tree.

I wrapped the box with paper from a large marketing flyer that had lots of solid black areas. This kind of coated paper makes easy folds and creases. With care I slowly folded with gentle finger work and trimmed with occasional scissorwork. I taped the folds and had a nicely wrapped black tree.

Next I took one of those green-plastic web sleeves that they put on one’s wine bottles to keep them from hurting each other, and trimmed it to wrap around the box. Its dimensional grid added symbolic pine branches, and, coincidentally, matched the angles of my sliced box.

Since the plastic was not large enough to cover the whole wrap, I was left with a triangle of space at the bottom. I added a patch of red metallic shopping-bag paper.

I thought the tree needed a star. I cut it from gold ribbon and mounted it on a small piece of twist-tie using hot glue.

And I finished the wrap with initials made with my ancient supply of rub-off type.

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Autumn Leaves Wrap

leaf-wrapI was walking in the park when these huge leaves caught my eye. I brought them home. The gift box is wrapped in a piece of advertising. I chose a wristwatch image for its fine details of metal, glass and precise graphic forms. These machined details contrast with the equally complex but organic details in the leaves. I also chose it because autumn leaves are a poignant symbol of the passage of time.

I had two leaves. One I wrapped around the gift, using hot glue to attach it. Then I glued the leaf-wrapped box to the other leaf. I chose this design to contrast the rectangular form of the box with the normal shape of the unbent leaf.

I also chose to use the underside of the leaf because of the  complex details of the leaves’ light-yellow veins.

This wrap is very easy to make. But it must be given soon after wrapping, since the leaves dry out rapidly. This effect, of course, adds to the symbolic power of this wrap, emphasizing the preciousness and brevity of the moment. I did not think of this wrap until long after the bright red maple leaves had already fallen, dried up, and lost their color. But there is, hopefully, next year.

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Transparency in Wrapping

soda-reveal-2Today’s wrap embraces the 21st century’s mandate for greater transparency in all things. I was giving a small sculpture commemorating son Canyon’s 20th birthday, and I had the idea of using the same two-cylinder recycle-wrap design that I had used two weeks ago with shaving can lids. This time I would use PET soda bottles.

I picked two clear ones and cut them six inches above their baseline. I had imagined simply inserting the gift, taping it shut and adding some kind of opaque band around the wrap. But some typical material-plane challenges reared up immediately. It is important to have the two halves aligned with parallel sides. This is hard to do unless you have made the cuts perfectly. I had not, so I used a technique honed while cutting (the) mustard bottles in half to get the last dollops: after the big circum-navigatory incision, I make a small one ninety degrees to it. This allows one to pinch one half of the bottle slightly and push it into the other half. I did this with my soda bottles. They snugged together. They could be taped into one.

But first I put some foam packing peanuts into one half, adding in the gift (a small driftwood and aspen-fragment sculpture of a “20” with red-trimmed crossbar) and then adding more peanuts. It is a little tricky getting the right amount of the foam objects, but at a certain point you can achieve a balance between mobility of the foam & gift and semi-visibility of that gift. I used small pieces of tape to hold the two halves together while adjusting the gift/foam mix. Then I put one large piece all around to seal up the wrap.

At this point began a typical process of trial, error and learn to determine what constituted a good belt of wrapping around this odd object. I tried lots of papers. Patterns lost out to solids, and flat solids lost out to this very wrinkly piece of green mylar, the color a contrast to the red driftwood crossbar that was peeking out through the foam peanuts. I added a simple yellow cotton ribbon and then an oval of adhesive plastic with the recipient’s name written on with a fine marker.

The wrap was definitely a bit goofy looking. So I added a tiny bow on the top, a wrap equivalent to a clown’s over-sized shoes and under-sized hat. I feel I have achieved some significant innovations in this wrap. 1) I have moved the lowly packing-peanut from its usual role of mess-after-the-fact to a new prominence as the equivalent of stage-smoke, both hiding and revealing the lead actor, the gift. 2) I have also found a way to make transparency a viable tactic for the wrap artist; you can see the gift before unwrapping but without abandoning the mystery of what that gift might be.

If you want to see what the sculpture looked like, click here.

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Band Wrap Combines with Two-piece Wrap

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This is the second of Jacob and Rachel’s wraps. I began this wrap as a two-piece wrap. The gold-polka-dot paper had just arrived on a wrapped calendar. But it was to be the second layer of the two-piece technique. I chose the black shiny paper of shopping back as the foundation.

The bag had a white logotype printed on its sides. The vertical lines of its extremely condensed type suggested using the vertical lines of the band wrapping to cover up the logotype; if some of the white lines showed through they would become part of the band design.

First I made a temporary placement of the gold paper so I would know the angle of the edge where two pieces join. Then I wrapped the thick black paper onto the top half of the gift.

The bands went on next, thins strips with soft, puffy folds along their edges.  I left plenty of black paper to the left and right of the bands, which were now looking like a kind of “bow” in the evolving composition. I placed and fixed the gold polka-dot paper. At this point the bands became more of a flower arrangement sitting in the vase of gold paper.

The basic wrap was in place but the wrap was still not complete. I experimented with various kinds of ribbon, placing them in sympathy with the angles of the wrap, but crossing on top of all the wrapping components. As I analyzed the way the dimensional bands tucked into and under the round folded edge of the gold paper, it seemed a good idea to make the ribbon both cross over the two-piece border and also tuck under the bands, ironically enhancing the illusionistic space of this flat design by real dimensional means.

I was getting close to completion. I had wanted some gauze ribbon in the system. I took a red piece and glued it so that it tucked into the  two-piece border, and then ran down parallel to the black-and-white ribbon. I took one of my computer printed labels, cut it into a strip and placed in tuck-under style adjacent to the red gauze ribbon. Now the wrap was finished, a lively constructivist design with a very dimensional feel and plenty of reference to traditional wrapping’s luxury textures.

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Band Wrap for a Wedding Gift

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This is one of two wraps for Rachel and Jacob.  The gift has curved edges on the short ends, and it is solid enough to wrap without a box. I gave it a quick white-paper wrap, and it turned out that the white paper was almost exactly the same width as the long edge. That meant that there was minimal paper overage for making properly folded and taped ends. But typically-folded ends would have been a wrinkly mess on the curves. Freed from that problem by the paper’s width, I was still left me with the challenge of covering the curved ends.

I decided on applying an edge-wrap of ribbon, choosing a shiny, patterned white ribbon for it’s wedding-dress feel. I put the ribbon aside for later application, and moved on to main wrapping tactics.

I disassembled a magazine and some mailers and made a bunch of printed bands, each with two folds, which gives my wrapping bands their slightly pneumatic shape and softened edges. One of the bands is folded tissue.

This gift was large enough that typical pages of magazines are too shorti. I had to use the wide paper of the folded-poster mailers for most of the bands. When those ran out I began to glue regular magazine page bands together, hiding the join by the way I positioned the band under a previously-positioned band.

Laying out the bands is an improvisational exercise. One after another, starting closer to the center, you keep on adding new bands. A bit of weaving is involved. Eventually you begin to see a satisfying arrangement, and that is when you should start to think about stopping.

Once the band wrapping was done it was time to glue the ribbon all the way around the edge, covering up the end wraps.

I printed out a label, and snugged it behind two bands.

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Aerosol Lid Wrap

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I thought of this one while lying in bed early one morning. I have been saving the plastic lids from shaving cream and deodorant for a while. Some are simple solid colors. Others have a metallic look. They are simple, flexible and tough. I have been using them as feet on boxy packages.

The idea here is speed and elegance. Pop the small gift (in this case a gift card) into the two lids. Join them together with tape. Wrap a piece of ribbon around the join and tape it shut too. Stick on a bow. Write the label on an office dot. You are done.

Of course, you will have given a proper amount of thought to the concept of contrast while knocking out this quick wrap. In this instance the tape contrasts in color and form with the smooth plastic caps; one has color and no pattern; the other has pattern and no color. The ribbon also avoids color and has a fair amount of texture, compared to the lids.

PS: if you run the initial tape join all the way around the two lids,  this wrap is waterproof and will even float, should you go overboard in rough seas.

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Soda-bottle Gift Bag

soda-1Today I made a birthday gift wrap for Linda using the poster-child material of the recycling craft world, the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) soft-drink bottle.

I lopped off the top and, using scissors, cut vertical slices down to within 2-3 inches of the bottom of the bottle.

I massaged and rolled the resultant leaves tightly between thumb and finger, pulling the leaf slowly downward, while just avoiding forcing an actual fold into the newly-bent plastic.

I waited until this leaf bending was complete to trim the tips of the leaves into a more appealing shape than that left by the initial slicing.

Now it was time to place the gift. I loosely wrapped the box in tissue, and, since the gift’s box was a handsome piece of box-making, with a sorely-needed contrasting graphic complexity, I chose to leave part of the box exposed. The emerging box’s linear pattern constitutes the stamen of this wrap-art flower.

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Wedding Gift Wrap

dandsA young friend married a ballet dancer from Japan. To wrap our gift I reached for two scraps of paper that were very different. The light-colored piece with angled stripes is actually the back-side of fancy foil paper. The dark-colored piece is a small Japanese retail bag, cut open and laid flat.

I then reached for something I have been saving for a while, a piece of under-carpet anti-skid foam with a very-dimensional checkerboard pattern of holes. I did not even have to cut it; the shape was already perfect to a) join along the horizontal line where the paper fragments join, and b) bring a new line into my developing system of angles.

I poked around the studio looking for paper scraps and objects to continue my emerging constructivist theme and the steady increase in contrasting textures. Finally I discovered a box of wood fragments on which I had added brush strokes to put excess paint to good use in the daily process of making oil paintings. I selected one and found a good position for it; one of the things the positioning does here is to cover a small rip in the blue-stripe paper.

Before gluing the board in place I rummaged through my ribbon boxes and found a wide gauze ribbon scrap with red edges. I set this along the angled line which the wood bar would later assume, wrapping it around the back, thus making some reference to traditional wrapping customs. The existence of the ribbon also makes the wooden bar assume the role of a bow. I glued the ribbon and the wood bar in place.

Last of all I consulted with my son on the Japanese greeting and we came up with this phrase which I believe says, “congratulations on your honorable wedding.” I printed it on card stock and attached it to the wrap. The final detail was to write the couple’s first names on a little label and apply it to the gauze ribbon.

The variety of patterns and textures, composed in angles over a classic two-piece base wrap demonstrates the pleasing complexity that can develop in wrap-art improvisation.