What I Did Last Night . . .

A Gift Wrap Seminar

Last night our church had a ladies fellowship entitled, "Home For The Holidays". Part of the program was devoted to seminars each featuring one aspect of holiday entertaining or decorating. I was asked to do a seminar and chose to do one on gift wrapping utilizing paper grocery sacks and recycled Christmas cards. This is most people's idea of gift wrapping with a grocery sack:

Now, here are some of the samples that I showed. First, you can cut open the grocery bag and use it, plain brown side out, combined with ribbons, greenery and doilies if you like the country/old-fashioned look. The one with the lace trimmed fabric also has a recycled greeting card tag, which was another theme presented in the seminar.

Those were the simpler presents. We then moved on to painted surfaces; these were painted with a foam brush and craft paints. Again, each box was decorated with laces, ribbons, recycled greeting cards and gel pens.

This particular present was a combination of techniques. The horse portrait was drawn and colored with colored pencils by my daughter. After masking off the portrait, I used regular spray paint to paint the paper bag. Once dry, I embellished the present with glue on rhinestones and a red bow.

Other ideas for surfaces included using shapes to create motifs by spray painting the motif color first, laying down solid objects and then spray painting the background color. When the objects are removed, you have a pretty pattern.

Basically, anything you can do with paper crafting you can do with a paper bag - they're much more durable for painting (especially with children!), and can be decorated by even the smallest child with stickers or crayons. I've even cut strips of paper and made a bow:

Last but, not least, I showed how to make paper poinsettias from a spray painted grocery sack.

These flowers are easily assembled using two layers of petals (well, actually "bracts" is the correct term rather than "petals" as these are unusual flowers), florist's wire with beads, and floral tape. The wire flower centers are sent down through a hole in the center of each layer, and then all the wires are wrapped together with floral tape to create a stem.

It was a fun seminar, and each participant got to take home a flower and a set of templates. By the way, I did not spend any money to put together any of the samples for the seminar - everything was free or I already had it at home.

Tomorrow - 30 Minutes Per Day is back!

Parting Shot: Santa Kitty. Stealing the spotlight again is Wellie. He actually did not care too much for the hat, but my son thought it was cute.