Make your own funky wrapping paper

I love giving gifts – even more than I like receiving them, believe it or not! – and part of the enjoyment is finding the perfect way to wrap and decorate the presents to make them extra special. I’ve been spending lots of time with my printer, trying out ways of making my own wrapping paper, and although it’s easy enough to print out images onto plain paper, the A4 size just isn’t big enough for most of the gifts I want to wrap, plus I’d like a nicer quality of paper that’s thick enough to wrap a gift without tearing on the corners!I looked in my stationary drawer and worked out a way to make larger pieces of wrapping that can still fit through the printer – using envelopes! I’ve got some A4 sized brown envelopes and I realised that I could cut off the sealed edge and the bottom flap in order to create an A3 piece of paper when it’s opened out. I folded it back on itself so that the envelope was inside out with the smooth side inwards. This way it can easily be printed on by feeding it into my A4 printer, printing on one side and then turning the piece over and feeding it back in to print on the other side.

I’ve used some of hubby’s drawings, which I’ve scanned into the computer and duplicated the images over and over on one piece of A4 using Publisher. You can use clipart or free printables that you can find online or if you’d like to use these same images I can send you the file – just drop me an email [email protected] for the free printable! These images look great on the rustic brown paper and remind me of childhood school days, but any images can be printed in this same way onto white envelopes too, plus some envelopes are a coloured inside, which would give you a different background effect for your homemade wrapping paper. I know it’s obvious now – but I didn’t think of it at the time! – any coloured A3 paper can be folded in half and printed on one side before turning over to print on the second side. This gives you plenty of paper to wrap around your gifts and you can join two pieces of A3 wrapping paper together for bigger gifts if needed.

What do you think of my homemade wrapping paper? Hubby was pretty pleased with it for his birthday gifts, especially because they are his drawings, but also because of the time and effort I’d put into making the paper. You can use images that your child has drawn to make wrapping paper for your family, or you could use photographs of the recipient to decorate the paper – if you can imagine it, you can do it!