Vintage delights

During one of my frequent trips to the thrift store I stumbled across a delightful bundle of vintage gift wrap.

For me this was really exciting because it combined two of my favourite things – vintage era and gift wrap – win for me!

Here are a few shots of my favourite patterns from the bundle.

Don't you love these wedding prints?

 

And these fun patterns?

 

And these adorable ones for kids?

 

I think this one is my favourite from the bunch.

Can you believe this package was only 35 cents? I wish there was a year printed on the package. I'd love to know how old it is.

 

Now that I have all this great paper, I need to find some gifts to wrap and some creative uses for it in home décor projects. Any ideas?

All buttoned up

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the cute buttons I found (read about it here). I had my first opportunity to put them to use this past weekend. My niece turned three and we got together with family to celebrate. Here is how I wrapped her gift.

I love how the green buttons match the green polka dots in the wrapping paper and just make it POP! What a happy coincidence - I had this paper on hand already.

No sewing required here. I just threaded the green ribbon through the button holes with a needle.

The little frill on the edge of the purple ribbon gives it a bit of extra girliness.

With a name like this, how could I not make a flower out of buttons?

I thought about pulling out my glue gun for decorating the envelope, but I went the quick and dirty route and just used double-sided tape. It worked out just fine and dandy.

So much fun to be had with a bit of ribbon and a few colourful buttons!

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Cute as a button

I just love buttons! Are they not the cutest little pieces of plastic you've ever seen? I was so excited to find these precious little jars of buttons in the bargain bin at Michael's craft store. Only $1.50 each – I couldn't pass them up!

And look how cute the lids are – sigh. Attach a little tag to the ribbon or a label to the jar and they would be perfect parting gifts for a crafting party. Or a little gift for anyone, just because.

I love that there are all different sizes in each jar.

Now, what am I going to do will all these little buttons? I have some ideas. Here is just a bit of inspiration I found from other bloggers.

The Little Housewares Company gives this idea for re-purposing buttons as part of gift wrap.

And Lauryn at Love Notes by Lauryn has a whole blog post of button DIYs. I love these two ideas of hers below. So pretty and lovely and cute!

 

I think I need to start a button collection. I would love to collect some pretty, vintage buttons as well as some more cute, coloured ones. This will require figuring out a way to store and organize my collection. I love a good storage/organization project! 

What are your ideas for using buttons? Do you have a button collection? What is your favourite way to organize and store them?

gifts for baby

My sister has a brand new baby boy! A few weeks ago we had a wonderful family shower for her, my brother-in-law and baby. I was put in charge of wrapping gifts - the best thing to be in charge of in my opinion! My oldest sister did all the shopping and supplied me with all the materials I needed – beautiful paper and oodles of ribbon. You can't have a properly wrapped gift without ribbon! (in my world at least). So one Friday evening it was just me, some baby gifts and lots of gift wrap & ribbon for a few hours – bliss! Some of the gift were awkwardly shaped or really soft – making them difficult to wrap. So I made a trip to the dollar store and picked up some nice brown baskets to put those items in. It made them much easier to wrap that way. Plus, now my sister can have some extra baskets for the nursery.
Here's how it all turned out.

I love the contrast of the solid blue and the brown-patterned paper. It was fun to balance out the two and add accenting ribbon.

An episode in gift wrapping

A friend and I went shopping a few weeks ago for a baby shower gift for a friend of ours. Buying baby gifts seems to be a trend in my life lately - lots of friends and relatives have growing families the past few years. It's been even more fun shopping for gifts these past few months because I've got my own little one on the way! But back to the baby and the gifts at hand.

We decided on a baby bath and grooming theme – shampoo, body wash, lotion, wash cloths, the oh-so-necessary Penaten cream, a baby toothbrush set and a baby grooming set. Given my love of gift wrapping, I asked if I could wrap the gift. It had been a while since spending a good long time carefully wrapping a gift. So I took my time, let my creativity have its way and enjoyed the process. I knew things were getting serious when I had to break out the glue gun! A couple of hours later, I was quite pleased with the result.

Organization is a beautiful thing

I am generally an organized person, but my box of loose ribbon that I regularly dig into when wrapping gifts, was getting seriously out of control.


After wrapping a gift today, I spent some time sorting by colour and placing each group into its own ziplock bag. I'm excited for the next time I have a gift to wrap – it will be a lot easier to see what I have and find the colour I'm looking for!

pretty presents

A gift is a wonderful thing. Something special picked out especially for a specific person. But the gift itself is even more special when presented in a beautiful package. For many things we are taught "don't judge a book by it's cover". However, when it comes to presents, I like to make the outside just as lovely as the gift inside.

In the last year, I've reacquainted myself with my love of gift wrapping. I remember as a kid, my mom would get me to help her with all the Christmas wrapping (not my presents of course) and I loved it! Picking out paper and ribbon to match, taping everything in place just so...it did much to feed my perfectionist tendencies.

Here are a few shots of gifts I've wrapped for friends and family.