Crafting a garment for hours and knitting kind thoughts and love into each of 10,000 (give or take) stitches produces a gift like none other. The thought of wrapping this gift in commercially produced giftwrap and donning a tacky, shiny plastic bow accompanied by a generic greeting card written by a stranger is just not right. A gift that comes from the heart need not be presented in a wrapped package at all but, for the recipient, there is a certain kind of joy brought about by being presented with a beautifully appointed vessel concealing a wonderful surprise.
This past week I had to make a choice with the presentation of a hand knit gift and decided that the package itself should reflect my creativity and values as well as the values of the recipient - I went green. The crafting process was rather easy and worth sharing so here it is:
The gift box was leftover from a coffee mug I had purchased. I wrapped the gift in tissue paper that had padded drinking glasses in a past life. For the outside a clean, brown paper bag was cut and used as eco-wrapping paper. Dolling up the brown paper package was quite a fun process as I hunted through some of my magazines and found some matte finish pages with a good amount of color on them, sliced them into strips and glued them to the box. For the bow, I managed to manipulate six of the strips into perminent loops and glued down the ends to each other in a graduated stack. For the card/gift tag I opened up a bunch of booklets I had salvaged from a print shop. The booklets contained different paper styles with line art, clip art, commercial graphics and a variety of print techniques. I cut out three very different pieces that complimented each other as well as the colors in the mag-page ribbon. When finished I thought the package looked as sweet as a piece of candy. Thoughtfulness, values, wonder, and joy.
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