I am not such a hot gift wrapper. I have a hard time getting excited about something that is destined to be torn to shreds. It is compounded by the fact that we generally end up rock-paper-scissoring who has to finish up the Christmas wrapping late into Christmas Eve….
I am not too fond of gift wrap from a visual perspective either. Much of it fails the cheesey test. I prefer brown paper packages tied up with string. Or ribbon. Or burlap. Or…. really anything! I have seen a couple additional wrap options in recent weeks that had me excited about wrapping once again. Or as excited as I am likely to get. ; ) Here goes:
Brown paper packages. I have saved our grocery bags and laid them flat under my mattress to iron them out. Tie options – burlap strips, raffia, dried flowers, pinecones, tissue paper flowers, decorator ribbon. Brown paper makes really nifty flowers as well.
Newsprint. The plain black and white pages look stunning with bold red ribbon. This image is from Danny Seo, the eco-editor from Country Home magazine. His blog is a wealth of green decor ideas! While you are at it you can use that newspaper to make very cool paper snowflakes.
Magazine pages as wrap. Ooohh very pretty! But then I would have to cut my magazines…. : / Ok maybe just the yucky ones. Again – visit Danny Seo!
finger paint paper. What else do you DO with all those abstract-ish artworks anyway?
burlap bags or fabric gathered into a bunch with ribbon at the top. Great for remnants and perfect for those of us who like to be done with our wrapping of odd shaped gifts right quick.
Starry Sky Journal 
Thanks for the great ideas for gift wrap!
First time on this blog and this post made me remember what I did in high school: use posters as gift wrap.
I can’t remember why, but my grandmother was offered all the unused posters from her video store and gave them to my mother, a teacher, to use for projects in her classroom. I remember occasionally finding a decent movie poster and using the white side to write a letter and then sending it to a friend.
The plus side to the posters was that the paper was thick enough that I ended up with crisp edges when wrapping.
The negative side was (and is!) there weren’t too many great movies, but at least the posters could be cut up for projects; they were going to be thrown away otherwise.
I love this idea! We buy butchers paper in bulk for our processing and we have used that for many wrapping projects, just use stamps for color and design. Works great and is much cheaper!! We also have made fabric bags, great project for the young seamstress, and re-usable, and very cute. I love the look of paper bags, remember covering books with it? Thanks for the ideas, now if I could just get that shopping done. I hate wrapping too. Seems so commercial somehow.
We bought a roll of butcher paper for twenty bucks that lasted several years for gift wrapping. Something else we just discovered: you can get a humongous box of moving-wrap paper for $8 that would go a reallly long way for wrapping, as well, tons less expensive than boughten gift wrap!