Sunday, February 24, 2013

No gift wrap challenge #1: Tees

Last December, I received a gift that included tips on how to live greener in the new year. One of the tips was about doing with less packaging. Since I've been using cloth shopping bags for years already, I thought of it in terms of gift packaging. I already re-purpose shopping bags, old calendars, and outdated office print-outs into gift wrappers. The next challenge for me is, can I do away with gift wrapping?

If you think about it, wrapping simply hides the gift from the recipient and adds the simple pleasure of anticipation. I don't think I can do away with wrapping completely, but I realize that there are some objects that don't need to be wrapped to maintain the element of surprise. I'll document the results here, of course, and this is the first.
  t-shirt 'wrapped' without gift wrapper A tee is a tee is a tee. I figure that it's really the design on the T-shirt that's important to hide, so I just folded and tightly rolled the tee, completely hiding the print in front, and tied it with three kinds of ribbons—all reused—in different widths. Since the shirt tag was blank at the back, I used it as the gift tag, just putting a sticker on it before writing the greeting. I tied the tag onto the shirt with the narrowest ribbon.