A Humane Turtle

I recently shared a bunch of ideas on how to make gift wrapping out of trash. I wrapped another set of gifts today. While the first set was made of trash I found in my apartment in Oslo, I had to find stuff around my parents’ house this time round.

One thing to look for is shopping bags. Some stores have bags with awesome designs, and they work really well for gift wrapping.

The paper bag of the local supermarket reads “Everything is going to be alright.” Isn’t that perfect for gifts? All I had to do was add some details: some birds, and the gift card as dot on the i.

For this gift I used a plastic shopping bag. The blue handle worked surprisingly well as decoration.

I have tons of reinforcement rings that I haven’t used for ages. Well, until today, that is. I used them to make a hole-y tree The ribbon is made of the material that the rings came on. No waste at all!

A CD wrapped in CDs, is that possible? I say yes! Cutting CDs is a bit messy though, I added tape around the edges to prevent additional mess. For this particular wrapping, I used old Knoppix 5 and Kubuntu 6 installer CDs. I will not miss them.

I also found a piece of a shirt that I had cut up for another project. The leftover I found was the bit around the shoulder. The seam there makes a nice line in the final wrapping. I added color with a stitched star and the stitches around the edges. I tried backstitch for the bottom edge, but I changed to  straight stitch for the other two edges. It made the wrapping easy to open, and the reverse side looked much nicer.

So far, I had used paper and plastic trash, but I hadn’t used food scraps yet. I decided that tangerine zest and and nutshells where both available without end and perfect for the season. And they look nice, don’t they?

For the last gift I didn’t experiment much with new materials. Well, I hadn’t used paper towels before (and no, I didn’t take those out if the trash – I used new ones). But this gift isn’t really about the materials; it is about the looks. It’s a double-cream hazelnut cake with a whole bunch of cream topping. Yum!

Update: I posted a part two now.

The other night I wrapped some gifts for loved ones. I’m not the wrapping paper kind of person though. When it comes to wrapping gifts, I want to recycle as much as possible. But I still want gifts that look nice! So, most of the materials I used I took from the paper trash. For books, I often used parts of the packaging they were shipped in. Here are some detailed shots of the gifts:

For the first gift I used the original packaging and painted it with acrylic paint.  I like the purple (front) side much better than the back.

Here I also used original packaging, added stripes of old printouts  and a picture I found in an old magazine.  Then I added some gold paint to make it look a little fancier.

Here I cut up a toilet paper roll as decoration.

I wrapped one gift in a magazine ad. The ad was about organic products (not all vegan, unfortunately). The card is a piece of a pasta carton. I put it all together with rubber bands.

Old bags from a local deli and a bit of string make nice gift wrapping, too. The card is made from a piece of a tea box.

And last but not least: bits of cardboard  make Tetris-style gift wrapping (card included).