Kathy's Waffle: Wrapping Wrap Up

Just a quick post for today. I thought I'd show some photos of some of the presents all wrapped up and ready for Christmas morning. I tend to forget some of my ideas for making gifts look pretty by the following year so putting them on here will (hopefully) be a good reminder.

The first photo is of our tree and gifts all nicely arranged (well, you can at least start off like that, eh?) The reason the pile looks so huge is that there are a couple of giant boxes in there - great for standing all the others on!

Next a few ideas for decorating the parcels

This was a small present in a big box! I made a concertina fan in the same paper as the wrapping, then added some berries, ribbon, leaves and flower from Creative Treasures, and some regular silver curling ribbon to finish it off

I also used one of the Memory Box Rosette dies a lot this year to make rosettes from wrapping paper. Topped with a large glitter card snowflake I think they worked really well

Snowflake Punches: EK Success and Martha Stewart

I've used the rosette die cut "flat" to decorate the corner or the dark-blue parcel (lower right), adding a strip of silver ribbon to brighten it up a bit more. The box in the top right corner has a border die cut used around it - this one is a spellbinders die.

I did remember that I tried to use my border punches with wrapping paper last year and it was a nightmare - the paper just kept ripping - so I didn't bother trying this time - dies are much safer, even if it does mean you need to join two together sometimes!

The Tree die cuts were a last minute idea - I've used them instead of tags to remind me which presents were from me to OH. He liked the idea and wanted to have snowflakes on those for me - but didn't fancy the fiddliness of my Spellbinders snowflakes so used the same punches mentioned already instead.

Finally I thought I'd mention the gift bag you can see in the centre of this photo - it was made by finding a box the right size for the gift then using it as a "former" to create the gift bag. This is a trick I read years back and is a really useful one to know. You can use anything - - raid the kitchen for finding something the right size - you're only using it to wrap the paper around to get the shape - just make sure you don't actually stick the wrapping paper to it by mistake! Once you've got the edge stuck down, and have turned the paper in to make the base (just like wrapping a regular parcel), remove the former and fold in the sides slightly to make the gift bag. punch holes in the toip and add some ribbon and it's ready to use

I'm hoping this post will help get me back into the blogging habit - I've been a very bad blogger over the Christmas and New Year holidays and I need to get back into good habits!

Happy New Year from the WaffleZone!

Please come back soon