Greening Your Holiday Crafts
by An Organic Conversation | December 12th, 2011According to a study by Stanford University, if every family used reused materials to wrap gifts rather than single-use paper, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.
Wow! When I read that, I felt even better about my choice to make my own
wrapping paper for my family gifts. For years I’ve made my own wrapping
paper out of brown grocery bags and newspaper. Usually I decorate the bag with
drawn or painted images of caricatures or scenes of winter. With the newspapers
I’ll cut out pictures or headlines that I’ll make into funny jokes the recipient will
appreciate. It started as a way to recycle and ended up as something that has
become a favorite tradition for our family.
Here’s a tip – plan your bag around the size of the gift so your artwork
won’t get lost in the cutting.
Another fun thing I’ve done over the years is to make potato prints of
stars, trees, and other festive images. if you haven’t done this before you can get some easy
instructions from this website
One more thing I like to do with my grocery bag wrapping paper is to make leaf
rubbings. All you have to do is take a fresh leaf from your neighborhood or park,
place it under the bag, and rub a crayon over the top. As you can see this can
create a wrapping that would be as much of a gift as the gift itself.
Excellent suggestion! I always use old materials anyway; newspaper, grocery bags, I even carefully remove, fold, and store wrapping paper on gifts that are given to me to re-use later (though I prefer the compostable varieties). I’ve long thought that by giving gifts wrapped in materials other than the standard one-use paper, my friends and family members might catch on to this same trend. I love the leaf print idea especially, I bet people wouldn’t casually rip that off and trash it without thinking about the effort and waste.