Save money by making your own wrapping paper. The green living motto is reduce, reuse, re-purpose, and that is exactly what you are doing by making your own wrapping paper, from everyday items you have laying around the house.
Waste Less This Holiday
For most of us, Christmas is the most expensive and potentially wasteful time of year. Buying gifts, cards, wrapping paper, Christmas trees, decorations and holiday foods certainly takes a big chunk out of our bank accounts and sometimes even savings accounts, not to mention the amount of environmentally damaging waste produced.
The good news is, no matter how much money you spend on every other holiday expense, wrapping paper is something that you can always save money on. You can make your own wrapping paper by recycling paper products in your home. But for the sake of style, we will use a relatively attractive, customizable, and simple material, a brown paper bag! Everyone will know which gifts under the trees are the ones that you wrapped because your homemade wrapping paper will be so unique and fresh!
What You Will Need
Potato
Exacto Knife
Sharpie
Acrylic Paint (Color of Your Choice)
Paint Brush
Brown Paper Bag
Scissors
Instructions
1. Cut your potato in half.
2. Take the sharpie and draw a shape that will be easy to cut out cleanly, such as a star or a triangle.
3. Take the Exacto knife, and carefully cut out the parts that are not part of the shape that you created, leaving only the shape on the potato because it will be used as a stamp.
4. Once your shape is carved neatly onto the potato, brush acrylic paint onto just the shape.
5. Cut off the bottom of the brown paper bag, and make a cut on one of the sides, so you have one large rectangular piece of brown paper.
6. Take your “stamp” (potato with acrylic paint brushed onto the shape) and stamp the brown paper bag randomly or create a design that you find appealing.
7. Let dry until the acrylic paint has dried, approximately one hour.
8. Wrap your gift!
Making homemade wrapping paper is as simple as that! The only money spent was on the acrylic paint and paint brush, assuming that you didn’t already have it around the house.
