Now that I’m not so busy with Christmas preparations, attending Christmas parties and anything Yuletide-season related, I will share how I wrapped my Christmas gifts for friends and colleagues.

I have long stopped buying giftwrappers (unless I use them as sheets or cut-outs for scrapbooking or cardmaking) and prefer recycling whatever’s at hand.  And since  I have a lot of plastic shopping bags, I decided to utilize them to help save Mother Earth.

The above is the front portion of the plastic bag from my favorite craft store.  The back portion is not printed at all so it makes a good wrapper.  For small gifts with no boxes, I’ve learned that it makes sense to put them inside an empty toilet paper roll and wrap them candy-style.  The resulting wrapped gifts look like this:

So as to differentiate both gifts, I used different ribbons: recycled plain red ribbon and in true Yuletide color scheme, red and green yarn.  The gift tags are from my supply way back in 2009.

Here’s another gift wrapped using the back portion of a Healthy Options plastic bag.  The letters J and B were traced using a red Sharpie pen on a lettering set.  Craft-punch Christmas trees were then added as an accent.

Lastly, for my plastic-wrapped gifts, there’s this.

The wrapper is again the back portion of a Healthy Options plastic bag.  The dotted and lined borders are recycled wrapping paper.  The gift tag is handmade with a shoelace-like ribbon for its borders.  The letter F foam letter is the recipient’s first name that I colored with green Crayola Flip-Top marker.  I finished this off by scattering green metallic stars around the letter F.

These gifts are wrapped using the back portion of Lay’s Potato Chips packaging.  This is actually from last year’s batch of Yuletide gifts that I never got to post.

These actually make a good substitute for metallic paper, which is very expensive.  As accents, I used a gold ribbon, metallic blue stars, and craft-punch snowflake from a recycled blue metallic paper.  The gift tags are store-bought.

Here’s another one.  The gift tag is from Hallmark and I just added a blue metallic ribbon over it.

For those who want to use such a wrapper, please make sure to thoroughly wash each prior to use.