Gift wrapping

Kids seem to get invited to a lot of parties. It feels that there's a birthday popping up pretty regularly, which brings me to the subject of gifts, or specifically, wrapping them...

If time is running really short I go to our great local toy shop, buy something that I hope the child will enjoy (and won't drive the parents mad ;-), and get the shop to gift wrap it, buy a card there and write on it my myself and get the kids to sign/scribble on it.

But if there's time - even the morning before the party, I like to get the kids to do the gift wrapping. Sometimes they've not had a part in buying the actual gift and so I find this a nice way to get them involved and feel they've contributed. Plus it's a great little craft project to keep them busy for a while.



As seen above, in our arsenal of gift wrapping bits we have:
• plain pieces of nice cardboard to make cards with
• painted pre-cut cards to use as gift tags
• card fronts to use as cards/gift cards
• balloons
• ribbon in bulk
• textas, pencils, crayons etc for decorating paper
• holepunch, scissors (and sticky tape)
• brown craft paper roll

So what we do is:

Cut off a piece of the craft paper, then start the decorating, on this occasion with big hand prints...



... there's usually a lot of decorating (kids don't do minimal, I've found!)...



Then I get them to choose a card. This is either a blank card, which is nice card off-cuts kept for this purpose, or old card fronts which I like and have kept. The butterfly shapes at the top were found blank at a craft shop and the girls painted one side with acrylic paints, leaving the reverse free for writing on (we then punch a hole in the top to thread the ribbon through)...



... the card is decorated and written on...



... and added to the wrapped present (in this case some dress-up props). We add ribbon, a gift card (or 2!) and sometimes a balloon too, for a festive feel.

One thing I've found I must do if I'm giving the kids the chance to do this is to largely leave them alone. While it's temping to suggest a limited palette/tasteful colour combination or whatever is aesthetically pleasing to me, it's their thing, and other parents understand that we're not going for high art here - it's a bit of fun and made with love.

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In other going's-on:

* I'm making some mittens tonight for my girl to wear to school tomorrow morning (hopefully!). It's a fun project, despite hiccups along the way. I'll show you tomorrow if they work out - or even if they don't ;-)

* While blog surfing recently I came across the Style Arc patterns. Have you seen them? I think they're basically replicas of on-trend clothes (they have "Pippa's dress" from the royal wedding recently). I'd normally think I wouldn't be interested but they look great. I've pinned several dresses onto my Pinterest 'sewing patterns' board. If anyone has made one I'd love to know what you thought. I'm seriously tempted by the Emma dress - ahem, after my stash-busting is done, of course ;-)