With what shall I wrap all these gifts?

Good Morning!

We all know how wasteful wrapping presents CAN be. I always tend to go for the obvious newspaper or paper bags to wrap gifts, but there are more creative ways to make a gift fun to open. (I mean, is that the purpose of wrapping paper? Just so you have a few minutes to be curious about what is inside? Silly, but necessary, I guess.)

What I have been doing this year is making little drawstring bags out of excess fabric and putting the gift inside, which can then be used as a purse for little girls. I have been making a lot of gifts for kids so the little purses will definitely be reused. (I wish I took pictures to post, but I keep forgetting to and I already gave them away!)

The above video is via Whole Foods Market who advocates reusing their store bags as gift bags since they are made of 80% post-consumer recycled PET bottles. They are now being sold in small gift sizes.

Then, on Inhabitat today, I noticed that they posted about a company in the U.K. called Represent that started a project called Future Present:

"Every year in the UK we use more than 8,000 tonnes of wrapping paper for our Christmas presents, equivalent to 50,000 trees. And sticky tape, being non-biodegradable, prevents us from reusing those mountains of wrapping paper."

They put together 20 great ways to wrap gifts from various designers, without using conventional wrapping paper.

Here are a few:

I really love the scarf idea and the hot/cold bags. Any other ingenious ideas you want to share?

Happy Gift Giving!

Niki