Handmade Gift Wrap

As the school year drew to a recent close, my daughter bought little gifts for her teachers, which I was happy to support. To further encourage her generosity, I suggested she create handmade gift wrap paper for each of her presents. I know from being a teacher and a mom, that a child’s “personal touch” has great value. So with the goal of pleasing her teachers and encouraging her creativity, I joined my daughter on our front lawn to create our own original, hand painted wrapping paper. Check out the results, we were both pretty thrilled! In a very short time (thanks to the big trigger spray bottles we used) we completely covered a 4’ x 10’ piece of soft “Cooperative Mural Art” paper with pure, brilliant color using Colorations® Liquid Watercolor. We added sparkle at the end with swirls of Washable Glitter Paint, and created a dramatic painting in less than 20 minutes. That is some quick artwork! After it dried, we cut up the painting into smaller strips of paper to wrap our gifts. With great enthusiasm my daughter loaded up her presents to take to school this morning, feeling quite happy and proud of her creations.

Try this sometime you have a group of presents to wrap. At just $7.99 for a 4’ x 10’ piece of soft mural art material, you get 40 square feet of wrapping paper to decorate - pretty economical gift wrap, indeed!

This was a fun way to make practical use of a “Color Spray Mural,” one of the lesson plans from Smart Art. Find the Color Spray Mural PDF listed under Lesson Plans on this blog.