Holiday Gift Wrapping with Grace & Saviour

Grace from Grace & Saviour hosted our last Maven Session of 2014 with a class on gift wrapping. We drank spiced apple juice and nibbled on cinnamon stars as Grace shared some of her top tips. If you still have a few gifts left to wrap then pour yourself a glass of something festive and take some inspiration from a lady who knows all about styling as Grace shares her tips here on the blog:

Brown paper packages, tied up with string, these are a few of my favourite things!

1. Use brown paper as a great base for everything.

2.  Use your parcel as the template for how much paper you need to cut, place it edge side, then main side then repeat in a row once, do this vertically, then edge, main edge horizontally, add 2cm each side, and this should give you the size of paper you need.

3.  Forage for winter foliage and berries in hedgerows and walks. Smaller, softer items sit well on parcels.

4.  Customise pre-cut kraft or other tags to match your style of parcel, cut or punch edges,use metallic sharpie pens or get some traditional stampers and add neon ink.

5.  Don’t be afraid of scale, use big beautiful satin ribbons on decadent little parcels, and bakers twine double wrapped on big parcels.

6.  Reuse old Christmas decorations as adornments on your parcels, old baubles, bells orornaments. Even dip, spray or paint baubles with chalkboard paint and write names on them to create your gift tags.

7.  Add a touch of snow by dipping a pencil eraser into some white acrylic paint and dotting the snow all over your parcel, or feeling more abstract, load up the brush with watered acrylic and flick the brush over the paper to create snow splatters.

8.  Cut last year’s Christmas cards into postcards or tags for this year by cutting to size, punching a hole and adding some string.

9.  Fall in love with washi tape, write on it, rip it, replace ribbon with it or use it to create festive shapes such as Christmas trees, candles and stockings.

10.  To create the best bows, manipulate the fabric as you tie the bow so that your ribbon stays the same way round as you fold through the stages of your bow.

Natural Gift Wrapping with handmade gift tags

1. Taking a sheet of watercolour card, cut with scissors or a guillotine some rectangles of card.  You can also select ready made kraft tags, orother colours of card.

2.  Take something that you can trace around to create a circle, a small roll of sellotape or washi tape for example and a fine black or gold pen. Place on the card and trace to make the circle.

3.  Around the circle draw simple leaf shapes in pairs, leaving space at the top to draw a simple bow.

4.  Inside the circle write a message, if your handwriting isn’t great, simply write in capitals.

5.  Cut a triangle from the bottom of the tag, creating a ribbon end.

6. Punch a hole in the top and thread through a loop of twine.