Home-made Gift Wr-pper

Or Killing Two Birds with One Stone

I think single-use p-per* wr-pper is such a waste of space. I shan't rehearse the arguments against it here. But you can read more about it here.

I've been presenting gifts to my son's classmates in my cloth gift bags. But I was stuck once when a gift didn't fit in any of the bags I have and I was still awaiting delivery of the new stock of organic cotton fabric I had ordered.

Solution?

It was the summer holiday and I needed to keep my son occupied. We did some potato printing.

We'd done this when he was much younger and he enjoyed it. You know the pap-r that comes in parcels as p-ck-ging? I smooth these pap-rs out for making (star) charts and for son to draw on. You can also use these for potato printing, kitchen-roll rolling (tie and tape jute string around the cardboard roll, brush over with paint and roll onto pap-r to make lovely patterns) or simply sponging.

We became a little 'factory' making pap-r wr-pper and used all of it wr-pp-ng birthday and Christmas presents. A friend thought that I should go into proper production with that idea. Obviously I hadn't.

It does not matter if this pap-r is slightly creased and there are tiny holes, really. When a child gets a present, all it wants to do is rip the pap-r off.

So last summer we went back to doing potato printing. It meant son and I had something to do together -- and got a bit messy -- and we had pap-r to wr-p his friend's present in. Two birds, one stone. See picture below:




His friend's mummy might have thought we were a bit miserly, but that is up to her.

So, this Christmas, if you have large pieces of pa-kaging paper -- or better still, flipchart pap-r that has been used only on one side -- lying around, and you need to give your kids something creative to do, try making your own gift wr-pper.

* Apologies for having to leave letters out of words here. It's my lousy attempt at confusing the Robot crawler so that it does not put unsuitable ads on this site.

Back to Organic-Ally.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I had put in html code that is supposed to make the AdSense tool ignore the 'paper' mentioned, in anticipation of their advertising p-p-r products. So I'm going in to mess up the spelling again. Sorry!

LSP
Saturday, 19 November 2005 at 20:56:00 GMT
Anonymous said…
Our Christmas Fundraiser at son's school this year was The Leprosy Mission Christmas catalogue(http://www.tlmtrading.co.uk/). The parents order essential Christmas goods and the school gets a cut. (Well, I put in all the work, collecting and collating orders, etc.)

Our orders came with ingenious p-ck-ging. The recycled brown p-p-r were 'knitted' by a machine (i imagine) so that it puffs up and provides protection. But you can flatten these bits of p-p-r out and re-use it or simply recyle it.

This p-p-r is so strong that I am going to experiment with getting son to 'print' on it for our Christmas wr-p-ing. Also made an organic cotton bag yesterday to a new design. It has been commandeered by son for his classmate's birthday this weekend.

I don't remember the last time I bought gift wr-pp-r.
Thursday, 24 November 2005 at 14:08:00 GMT
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