Unique Gift Wrapping from Our Virginia Interior Design Office

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Every year for Christmas I try to be a little creative with my gift wrapping.  It started a few years ago with investing in nice ribbon and has recently become more outlandish. 

Last year, I wrapped everything in the Wall Street Journal as a tongue-n-cheek homage to the financial crisis.  I might have thought it was much more clever than my gift receivers judging from their responses.  They probably thought I was being cheap!

This year, I wanted to do something creative with the paper again so I ended up using old wallcovering samples from the Gibson Design Group office library.  I think that they turned out well, although it was not an easy task. 

If you struggle with wrapping using normal wrapping paper, this may give you fits, but if you're okay with corners and edges not being perfect you should try this application.

A few things I learned:

• Wallcovering is obviously thick so cut the pieces allowing for very little extra to be on your packages.  This reduces bulk in your folds.
• Tape does not affix to walllpaper as it does to wrapping paper.  You can fix this by using hot glue or, like I did, add some reinforcement to the seams with the ribbons and bows.
• Pay attention to the repeat on the wallcovering and center your gift to show the patterned parts of the paper.  In a couple of cases, when using paper that had a small pattern on a large amount of field (field is the background color on any paper), I ended up not seeing the design as well. 
• Don't be a perfectionist.  This will be frustrating if you try to make each part perfect.  Your gift recipient will be looking more at the creativity of your wrapping and not at every edge so don't sweat it.

You can see more shots of the wallcovering wrapped presents in our Flickr album.

What have you used that was out of the ordinary for wrapping gifts?