The Greenest Wrapping Paper You Can Make (for free!)

This post is a part of A Greener Christmas Guide, a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the holidays with a lighter impact on the earth.  For more of this series, please visit A Greener Christmas Guide.

Since we’re back in the United States for Christmas, I decided to take advantage of a free resource to wrap most of our Christmas presents:  old blueprints!  I called a local contractor who was more than happy to share stacks (and stacks) of old blueprints with us.  These white papers, measuring 2×3 feet each, had print on one side.  They were also destined for the garbage can – which means they met our green wrapping paper challenge.  

Before you knew it, my parents’ living room looked like this:

And just for a good laugh, half of the blueprints are actually from a recently built Hooters… which, um… you know, makes our project more intriguing to a larger pool of gift recipients who aren’t into snowman stamps!

Your Super-Simple Guide:

The decorating was fast and easy with these old school techniques:

  1. Christmas stamps ($1 at Michaels) and ink pads
  2. Slices of potato cut into Christmas shapes with cookie cutters and dipped in acrylic paint or ink pads

 

All our gifts going to charities and our church are getting wrapped in our homemade project.  These ones are next to our locally grown poinsettia!

And in case you’re my nosey little sister (who took a heap of this paper with her to college), I thought you’d like to see this little glimpse from our mom:

Now we just need more presents to wrap…