Holiday Gift Wrapping

Holiday Feature

Holiday Gift Wrapping

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Packaging Ideas For Gift Giving

You can find papier mache boxes in craft stores that invite your personal touch like paint, carefully glued wrapping paper or a photo collage or pictures drawn and colored by the kids. The boxes come in many shapes and sizes and are inexpensive. Or you may get really creative and create your own papier mache containers.

Save your empty wine bottles and corks to use for liqueurs and flavored wines or vinegar's. You may cut slivers off the ends of the corks that have been stained by the wine and reuse them.

You'll find the best and most unusual containers at flea markets, estate sales, thrift shops and garage sales. Antique tins, baskets, unusual boxes, old spice jars, pretty glass jars and anything that has an air tight lid is a potential wrap. Think beyond the obvious. You can house wrapped foods in an old straw hat, planter, colander, army helmet, bucket, pottery, canisters, cookie jar, bread box or any item with a natural cavity.

Create your own homemade labels. Neatly print or type the name of the gift and directions for use and hand decorate with your own whimsical drawings—even if you failed finger painting in kindergarten.

Culinary Packaging Resources

Order the Embellishments catalog with a bevy of creative, colorful gift packaging ideas and products.

Embellishments
Creative Packaging For The Home Gourmet
PO Box 1506
Cleveland, MS 38732
Catalog is free. 800-600-6885

The Bee Skep Herbary carries vinegar bottle and cruets with cork tops at reasonable prices. They also offer preprinted labels for your herbal gifts. Order a free catalog.

The Bee Skep Herbary
PO Box 146
Lahaska, PA 18931

The Wooden Spoon catalog offers a beautiful set of four 12-1/2 inch colored glass bottles with corks ($39.95) as well as a set of six unusually shaped spice jars ($21.00).

The Wooden Spoon
PO Box 931
Clinton, CT. 06413-0931

Basket Decorations

Use a hot glue gun to affix ribbon, silk flowers, ornaments, tinsel balls, fabric, lace, rick-rack and old jewelry to your gift baskets. Do not laugh at that last one. In my crafts-crazed days, I studded a basket with old, cheap costume jewels. My Grandmother, of course, raved about it.

Use spray paint to coordinate the basket's color with the recipient's decor or hand paint with your own designs.

Line baskets with colorful and/or antique linens like napkins, tea towels, pot holders, doilies, even folded tablecloths. Or get some Easter grass, tinsel, raffia, tissue paper or fabric swatches. My mother makes quilted squares that are a neat addition to country looking baskets and double as a wall decoration or place mat.