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.