Art-Inspired Gift Wrapping

After enduring weeks and weeks of sub-par weather in Georgia, we finally had some awesome sunny days that reminded me why I moved here in the first place! One of my kids' favorite outdoor activities is chalk drawing, so they devoted an entire afternoon to honing their artistic skills in the driveway. I decided to capture some of their creations and use them in a unique way.

I first started off by taking pictures of my favorite pieces. This drawing was done by my oldest son...


and this one was made by my youngest son...


I'm currently in the process of planning both of my sons' birthday parties, so I've got birthday on the brain right now. That's probably the reason why I thought it would be cool to make gift wrap using their artwork.

To do this, I simply copied the pictures multiple times and created a .pdf file. I then had the file printed onto large sheets of paper at a print shop and my wrapping paper was ready!


I found a terrific tutorial that shows how to make gift bows from magazine pages - check out the tutorial here. I used the same steps to make a bow using the artwork wrapping paper...


When you stumble upon an amazing blog, do you spend hours looking back through the older posts? Maybe it's just me! Well right after I found the gift bow tutorial on the How About Orange blog, I discovered a tutorial for creating gift bags - here's the link. So I used my youngest son's masterpiece for this project...


So at this point I was in full gift wrapping mode. I found some takeout boxes that I use to hold favors and thought it would be fun to cover one in the artwork wrapping paper. This was really easy to do. First open the takeout box and lay it flat on the paper. Then trace the outline of the box, cut it out and glue the wrapping paper onto the box.



Thank goodness I ran out of paper - I can only imagine what I would wrap up next!