3 Easy Steps to Beautifully Wrapped Presents
Before the Christmas festivities, one of my favourite things is wrapping presents. My first job when I was a teenager was wrapping presents for people in the shopping centre. Since then, and I’ve prided myself in my wrapping (and rappin’) skills!
I’ve broken it down into three easy things to keep in mind when making a beautiful and consistent selection of gifts to place under the tree that will have all the friends and family raving.
1. Keep Your Wrapping Plain
I like to keep the wrapping base plain, so the rest of the beautiful details stand out as a feature. This is your base that everything else builds from.
For these gifts, I’ve used a brown paper base which gives a lovely earthy and organic feel. It offsets wonderfully against the bolder colours of green, red and gold that I’m using for my ribbons and accessories.
2. Accessorise
You can play around with your accessories on top by using Christmas decorations like, baubles, stars and little bells. These are always so pretty and not too expensive at all!
Then you can use different kinds of ribbons such as Christmas coloured tartans, grosgrain ribbons with white stitching, satin greens etc.
The third decorative element is using foliage & berries. I’ve used things like gold-dusted red holly & pine cones, pine & spruce needles keeping it within a traditional Chrissy theme.
If you vary these accessories from gift to gift, they all look uniquely considered and individual. Mix up your different combinations of ribbons and decorations and your sweet suite of pressies will look tip top!
3. Keep your colour palette traditional
For under your tree, with so many different things going on, it’s nice to draw from your existing classic colour palette. I’m a sucker for the traditional red, white and green Christmas colours with a bit of metallic gold or brass. They’re classic festive colours!
With so many different wrapping papers kicking around, under the tree can tend to look like absolute chaos. But drawing from a set palette will give your tree and gift set up a beautiful consistency. You won’t want to open the presents because it all looks so nice together!
Some hot tips for crisp wrapping paper:
- Always turn the gift upside down when first wrapping the present. This way the seam line of your paper will be on the base when your present is turned up-right. The top will be smooth and seamless
- When you measure your excess paper to wrap around the entire gift, allow and extra 2cm so that you can fold the cut edge under itself to give the paper a really straight and crisp edge.
- Use as little tape as possible as it can look quite ugly. Good quality sticky tape will help you with this. Crap tape always causes dramas!
- For the ends, you want to fold the side edges in first. Never the top and bottom edges. That’s how the pro’s do it. It gives a much cleaner look. You can see me doing this in one of the images above.
- Use more ribbon than you need, you can trim it back after. There’s nothing worse than running out of ribbon for your bow on the top!
Have a go at these tips and tag #thegrounds so we can check out all your super-mega-pro pressies.
… aaaand that’s a wrap!