Today I would like to present you with a variety of ideas to help you green up holiday wrapping. Some of these ideas take a little more creativity that others, but all are relatively simple to create. For most of these ideas I used items I already had around the house.

This first idea it to print your own wrapping paper on the inside of a paper grocery bag (or some packing paper, or leftover tissue paper). I used this project as a creative opportunity with my daughter and we had fun stamping several paper bags we had with some paint and some stamps we already own. If you don’t have holiday stamps, you can carve stamps out of a potato or cut up sponges in to shapes or designs.

There are 2 more ideas in this picture which include making homemade cinnamon gift tags that double as ornaments  and another gift (& smell great too!), as well as ribbon & flower bows made from VHS tape and plastic grocery bags. The ornaments were another easy project to do with my 5-year old daughter. I have to admit that I handpainted the name on this gift, but then I came across a Silver Sharpie Marker on sale at Lowe’s and thought I would buy it and try it out. Oh my! That silver permanent marker is so much easier and looks just like the ones I handpainted.

I love this next idea because it serves it’s purpose and then I can still use it later, fabric as wrapping for presents. I bought this remnant because I loved the pattern and fleece is so easy to work with and remnants at JoAnn’s are always 50% off the regular price and you can use those 20% off your entire purchase coupons on these. Anyways, I did not hae a project in mind for this piece of material yet so I used it to wrap a present. I made sure I matched up the fabric to the size of the present so that I didn’t have to cut it all all. I used 4 safety pins to secure the fabric closed. The ribbons was also leftover and found a piece that was a length that I would not have to cut it.

This next idea shows another version of the flower bows made out of a plastic grocery and leftover yarn, as well as a homemade tag made using decorative scissors, a punch & leftover card stock and wrapping paper made by recycling kids artwork. My kids love that we are using the artwork to wrap presents and it is one less thing in the pile of projects. If you have more artwork, consider making bookmarks from recycled artwork. Think about what you have in terms of art supplies to make gift tags, the ideas are endless. We stuck with cardstock, punches, stamps, paint, markers and cinnamon ornaments, but look at what you have and you may be surprised what you come up with.

 Another idea is re-use gift bags from year to year. Paper bags can generally be re-used several times before they start to show any wear, but cloth bag will hold up much longer.  That large fabric bag came to us 5 1/2 years ago as gift wrapping on a present sent from Amazon that was no taller than 8 inches tall. It was rather comical getting a present in such a large bag, but it had been reused every Christmas in our house because there is always one big present out there tha would cost a small fortune (not to mention a tree’s life) to wrap. If you have minimal sewing skilling and some leftover fabric (or find an article of clothing destined for Goodwill), then consider sewing your own gift bags. Or you can locate a retailer that sells plain fabric bags (there are lots of them out there). The small red cloth bag is the lone fabric gift bag that I purchased 3 years ago that hasn’t been gifted outside of our home.

So, if you do need to purchase wrapping supplies, think about buying bags that can be re-used from year to year, or gift boxes that have a Christmas image printed on them and do not need wrapping paper. If you have plain boxes, you can always decorate them with stamped images like the hand stamped paper above.

One last idea that takes minimal sewing skills is to make your own bottle gift bag from a dress shirt sleeve.

Be creative and have fun with your holiday wrapping!