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.