19 December 2012

Life skills - candle-and-ink wrapping paper

Spending money on giftwrap, which just gets torn off and thrown away, seems pointless to me - I'd rather have the fun of making it from simple and/or redundant materials.

It doesn't always turn out well, though....

I started by rubbing a plastic doily with a candle onto newspaper, and ran the iron over it so the wax would soak in -
 then covered the paper with ink from the huge bottles found on sale many years ago - limited to magenta, orange, red, yellow. Here they are drying. Did I think the ink would be thick and solid, like black in is?? -
The ink colours lose their rich promise when the ink dries, but the idea sort of works in small sections of the reverse of the sheets of newspaper, where the ink has soaked through -
Otherwise, the words and pictures get in the way of the patterning.

Back to the drawing board, or rather the rubbing board, with plain newsprint this time, and with a bit of colour splodging and mixing -
Still wet - but much more like what I had in mind! However ... newsprint gets "crisp" very easily and you have to be very careful when making those tidy corners on the parcels - it can tear so easily.

(update) Here they are, the ghosts of xmas 2012 -


1 comment:

irene macwilliam said...

As a family we decided not to buy wrapping paper but to use newspaper and paper from magazines. It is fun to try and decide if the chosen covering has a particular relevance to the person who gets it on their present. I found a page today with a large headline of - Roger and Out, General-. I am married to a roger.