Bright, shiny packages

With Christmas only a few days away, hopefully all you have left to do is wrap your presents!

My wrapping this year sort of came about by accident. I had a completely different idea planned, involving white paint and a mini roller brush, but when I tried it out it just didn't look how I had imagined. So I decided to ditch it and go for something completely different! I looked around our study to see what crafty supplies I had and this gold glitter caught my eye - it's a particularly nice, chunky glitter I bought to use in the kitschy baubles. I had gold on the brain a bit, having just been ogling this.

I traced around the lid of a jar to get a circle, then cut out about 20 of them from plain white paper. Then I spread a layer of the glitter over a large sheet of paper and spread glue over the surface of one circle at a time, then pressed it into the glitter - this gave a nice, even coverage. I wrapped each of my presents in brown paper and once the glitter circles were dry I glued one onto each package. On smaller packages I wrapped a circle around an edge, so it ended up looking like a semi-circle. Then I grouped together the presents for each person and tied them up with natural twine. I really like the unexpected combination of glitzy gold and subdued kraft paper and natural twine.

Although it's a bit more time-consuming, I like wrapping each present individually, and then tying them together if you have more than one per person. It makes the unwrapping process much more exciting! I had a customer a few months ago who bought about 10 small presents for a friend's birthday and asked for them all to be individually wrapped. She said the birthday girl had so much fun unwrapping each package and seeing what surprises were inside!

I always try to link my Christmas cards and wrapping, so this year I decided to use some leftover glitter circles to make my cards. I was inspired by Lillian's beautiful mt tape wreath cards, so I decided to cut up my glitter circles into little shards and shape them to form a sort of wreath or starburst. It was quite fiddly glueing each of the little shards on but I was happy with the result! I stamped the "merry christmas" message using some super cute alphabet stamps I picked up at Remedy.

I'll be sharing some other wrapping ideas later today so if you haven't got Christmas all wrapped up yet, I hope this provides a bit of inspiration!