The Royal Wedding towel was gathered at all four corners and held with an elastic band with the corners tucked to create a kind of rose. For the longer tea towel, it took some creative origami folding skills to tuck the fabric back into itself and have a nice image showing. I wrapped it in some "scrap ribbon" (an old bikini tie).
As you can see, all gifts have a handmade gift tag; I'll get to those in a bit. The apron was the easiest to use for a small, round gift. I put the gift in the centre, gathered the corners and then used the strings to wind around like present ribbon, tied off with a beautiful bow.
The scarf looks like a weird bundle around another gift, as it is a longish pashmina, and I didn't want to cut it, etc., so, I tried to wind it around in a way that looked at least symmetrical and where I could tuck the fringe ends into the wrapped scarf at the bottom. It ended up with two kind of wound "knows" at the top. I tied a gift tag to one. Later, I added a "bow" (really just a flower I made out of fringed map pieces. I taped a safety pin to the bottom and glued a circle of map over top to hide the tape. I pinned the flower to the gift.
I also had a plain brown paper bag; it actually has a stamp on it from the place I bought the gift, but, I decided to use the other side to draw a wintery tree on with glitter glue. I stuffed it with some repurposed tissue from an Anthropologie purchase and used some leftover raffia (the place I buy flowers from ties off bouquets with it) to attach a hand-drawn gift tag. I'll get to those now- I used watercolour paper (thick card stock works to) so that it was firm and drew little designs. The third one in, I got the idea to to Christmas balls, so using coloured fine-tipped pens, I simply drew designs and cut them out. I smeared glittler-glue on some with my fingers to make them look glossy. Then, I used a safety pin to poke holes and fed raffia through to attach to the gifts. Simple, but pretty.
For the already boxed gifts, I decided to use leftover maps (GPS makes them seem kind of obsolete now, especially because they're of cities that I know pretty well, too...) to wrap the boxes. I thought of using yarn or twine as ribbon to keep it simple, but I would've had to buy some. So, instead, I used strips of map to make "ribbons" and bows. There's no real formula to how the bows were made. I cut strips of map, made loops, and stapled and taped them together in sections until I assembled something I liked. The fringe flower bows were the easiest to make. I cut different sized circles, stapled them together, used scissors to fringe them, and glued a tiny circle over where the staples went. Double-sided tape would be best to put it to the gift, but I just used a glue stick.
And voilà, beautifully wrapped gifts using repurposed materials, underneath a "Christmas tree..."
