Reusable Cloth Gift Wrap

Reusable Cloth Gift Wrap

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Do you want to live a more zero-waste lifestyle? Do you want to reduce the amount of trash your household generates? Why not try to make these simple and beautiful cloth gift wraps, perfect for every holiday.

These little wonders are much easier to store than the regular rolls of wrapping paper because they can be folded up and put into a small drawer or box. They are also much cheaper. You can use leftover fabrics or even cut up old but clean clothing to make these package wraps.

How to make reusable cloth gift wrap.

The first thing you want to do is to collect all the spare and leftover cloth you have on hand. I had an entire box of sewing cloth. I went through it and separated the colors. Reds and whites worked best for Christmas gift wrap while pastels looked great for the girls birthday presents. If you don’t have any leftover cloth available, you can easily buy some fat quarters, remnants, or fabric on clearance.

Next, you will want to clean up your leftover fabric remnants. I cut off any fraying edges. Knowing more of the packages are either square or rectangular, I trimmed the fabric into these shapes. The best method I found for cutting the fabric is to use Fiskars 45mm Contour Rotary Cutter and a Fiskars 24X36 Inch Self Healing Rotary Cutting Mat. Using this gives perfectly amazing straight edges. I use mine for every craft project.

I didn’t know exactly all the sizes I would need, so I made sure I achieved the largest size piece of fabric for each cut. Now, it wasn’t that easy.

How to use the fabric to wrap up your gifts.

I folded each of the cut fabric pieces and can now easily store them away for later use. When you are ready to wrap up your gifts, then you can easily do this with your choice of fabric and of course the correct size and a large piece of ribbon.

First, layout a long piece of colored ribbon or gardening twine. Next, place down a piece of fabric with the print side down. Then place your package on top that you want to wrap up.

Fold over the left and right sides of the fabric over the top. Next, fold the ends of the package like you would regular paper gift wrap. Look at the picture to the right. These folds make the package look clean and neat. You can use a small piece of tape to keep up each side of the folds.

Finally, it is time to wrap up the package with your colored ribbon. Pull the ribbon up to the top and wrap around itself to make it look like the picture to the left. Then make the ribbon go around the other sides and pulled to the top of the package. Tie it in a bow at the top tightly and Viola!

You now have a beautiful package that can be unwrapped and re-wrapped over and over again. This will reduce your paper waste during the holiday season and lead you into a zero–waste lifestyle.