wrapartist

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I 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.