Easy DIY Ideas for Custom Wrapping Paper

This post was originally published on DIY Network’s blog Made + Remade in December 2014.

Dress up your gift wrapping for birthdays or holidays with some custom touches. Whether it be with everyday permanent markers, paint pens, watercolors, or handmade block printing stamps, the recipients will be charmed. Custom wrapping is an especially nice way to engage your kids in the gift wrapping process too, so make a day of it, and let them be creative and have fun because there’s basically no going wrong with coloring on plain paper.

Watercolors straight onto tissue paper are one of my favorite executions. The tissue paper wicks the paints beautifully, dries quickly, and while it can be used to dress up bagged gifts like traditional tissue paper, you can also layer a few sheets together for an opaque wrap for covering small packages.

Both Butcher paper gift wrap and kraft paper are easy (and affordable) solutions if you’re wrapping a lot of gifts, or BIG gifts. Dress up plain, ordinary paper with pom-pom ribbon wrapping to make a great statement. Imagine how they would look amassed beneath a tree!

Handmade stamp ideas are endless. Use a carved potato, a piece of high-density foam, or unlikely objects–like weatherproofing strip–to create custom stamps.

I don’t have glorious handwriting myself, but I know lots of you do (hint: awesome envelope addressing job by Ellen). Pen a message or practice your calligraphy on ordinary ruled paper, and let that be your gift wrap. (If your kid is learning cursive like mine, let them have some fun with this idea):

Pine trimmings on gifts are always easy and perfectly fitting. Use washi tape to attach it, like shown above, or follow the easy tutorial here to learn how to decorate your gifts.