ne of my mates is married to a guy that we’ll loosely call a ‘hippie’. He’s extremely environmentally friendly to the point where he won’t let his kids use staples to make recycled paper garlands because it’s a waste of staples. I used to think he was a bit extreme but now I’m starting to totally get where he’s coming from. I sent out the bare minimum of Christmas cards this year and yet I still felt icky as I popped them into the post thinking ‘Landfill, landfill, landfill…’. So this year I decided to learn how to make reusable fabric gift wrap.
I really struggle with giving up gift wrap because I LOVE wrapping presents. It’s seriously like a sport in my family. Mama Smaggle has the most amazing colour coordinated Christmas tree in shades of antique green, red and gold and every year I make it my mission to totally screw up her colour scheme with fluro wrapping paper or geometric black and white modern ribbons on my presents. My favourite was when I did bright orange paper with sparkly blue bows. They looked so shit house under the tree… it was my greatest clashing triumph. Anyway, each year I feel less and less okay with all the waste from Christmas present paper but I also don’t want to deprive anyone of the joy of actually unwrapping their presents. So this year I’m wrapping all my presents in fabric. Here are a few techniques that I adapted from the Japanese Furoshiki Guide. I absolutely love this guide but I’ve added a few little twists and extra bits here and there because I like my presents to look present shaped and some of the Furoshiki ones are a bit lumpy. Little bit of trivia: The Ministry of The Environment of the Government of Japan released this guide. The actual government released it. How cool is that? Japan wins at everything. What legends.
For any of these you just need a square of fabric… the ones I’ve used are about 50cm by 50cm and they work perfectly for standard wine bottles and books. You’ll need bigger squares for bigger objects but just use your judgement – if you can loosely tie your object in your square of fabric, it’s probably big enough.
The key with reusable fabric wrap is to teach the person that you gave it to how to use it so they can recycle it and pass it on. Or just send them the link to this post so they can figure it out themselves.
Fabric can be just as cheap as paper (or free if you find it lying around your house) and you can use it again and again. I can’t guarantee that I won’t ever use paper wrap again but if I at least commit to doing it at Christmas that’s a pretty big reduction in my personal waste. I think I’m going to source some pink tulle to really piss off Mama Smaggle…
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What are your plans for Christmas wrap this year? Do you go all out with spendy flocked paper? Or do you grab a couple of rolls of cheap wrap at the $2 shop?
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