So the craziness of the holiday season is coming to a close, and while the tree still gets a few more days to occupy precious floor space in the living room, most of the holiday stuff has already been put away. Each year as the season approaches I swear that I’ll be more organized, that I’ll have everything purchased and wrapped ahead of time, that I won’t spend all day cooking and cleaning and that THIS year I’ll get cards mailed out. Likewise each year as I recover the house from under the piles of crumpled paper and candy bits I swear that I’m going to take the time to put things away correctly so its not quite so crazy next year. While I don’t really see any hope in sight of the pre-season activities getting any better, my post season has gone pretty well.
My Wrapping Box
For the past few months I’ve been saving toilet paper rolls in our craft area (also known as the chair in the corner). Wasn’t sure quite what they were for yet but just felt compelled to create a little stash of them for some project that I knew would appear. As it turns out, I was saving them to store all of my wrapping ribbons. About 2 hours on Monday were spent sorting through the papers to be recycled/wrapping to be saved in an attempt to organize the wrapping. I think it worked out pretty well – and would not have taken nearly so long if there hadn’t been a toddler balloon fight in the background.
I just coiled the longer ribbons around the tubes and then secured with either a piece of tape or a rubber band (depending on the type of ribbon) and then separated the different coils by a rubber band in between to create even spacing. Then inside each of the toilet paper tubes I stuffed a bow of some sort in a complementary color. For all the shorter pieces of ribbon I created a long tube and wrapped all of them on a single tube/roll – in order to distinguish that these cannot be used for normal sized presents and are meant for tiny gifts or for bows. Nothing is quite so annoying as when you grab ribbon, have it almost all the way around your present and realize that its just a bit too short – argh!!!! The last bit of organization I attempted was taking all of the scraps of curling ribbon and making cute little curly bows out of them, one less thing in the trash and a little less work for next year.
For about 3-4 years now I’ve been using brown paper to wrap all of my xmas gifts. My hope is that a few years down the line I’ll be free of all of the printed papers and gift bags and my wrapping station can just consist of packing paper, a few boxes, tissue paper and lots of pretty ribbon.
manicrabbit 