W- Recycled Wrapping!!!

So Saturday was my sister and my niece's birthday so I made my niece a bunch of flower hair clips and headbands so she can be stylin for 6th grade this year. :)

I got this great book from the library last week, Simply Green Giving by Danny Seo. If you can get this book from your library or the bookstore I highly recommend it. It has some of the greatest ideas that I've seen, not just on wrapping but also on gifts to give people. So one tip it had was to use your paper shredder and shred magazines along with those perfume samples for the filling in your box. 

My shredder does cross cut shreds so it is quite messy but I loved how festive it looked with the flowers.

Next idea is to use paper bags as your wrapping paper. Luckily I just went to Trader Joes and I had a couple bags from that trip so all you do is trim off the bottom and down one side so you are left with a flat sheet of paper.

I also cut off the handles, then later on actually ripped them off so they weren't in the way.

Next idea: Use the tape from your old VHS tapes as ribbon!! I would have never thought of this and you know you have a ton of those old tapes that you never watch well it is easy as pie to have some awesome black ribbon.

I used my husband's recording of the Simpsons and you need a small philips screw driver because you have to remove 3 screws off the back.

Unscrew the screws and BAM you've got a whole lot of black shiny ribbon.

So much ribbon in fact that if your cute little one gets a hold of a spool it is no sweat because you have a ton more!

So I used some scissors and I made a bunch of the ribbon curly then tied them together for a snappy looking bow and added the rest as some interesting lines.

So my next present I decided to use the printed side of the paper because it looked nice, but it needed something extra. Soooo...

I made a flower out of used dryer sheets and a pearl!!!

I took 2 dryer sheets and then folded them in half. I cut out leaf shapes in 4 different sizes. So I have 4 petals of each size.

Then I layered them on top of each other from large to small, threaded a needle and poked it through the center of them.

Then I went through a pearl and back through the petals. I just tied a square not on the back.

Here is the finished piece!! Makes it look much more festive. The fun thing is that it smells really good still so  my niece was all excited about it and I told her she could put it in her clothes drawer to make them smell yummy.  My family was quite impressed with my recycling wrapping, especially the VHS tape ribbon. So before you throw something away try to think if there are any other uses for it, You'd be surprised what you can come up with.

Happy Wrapping!!