DIY Potato Stamp Gift Wrap
It's crafty Christmas time! Every year I seem to get a little more into decking out our Christmas presents, and this year I went all out and decided to make my own wrapping paper.
Presents! For this project I made another foray into potato stamping, and I think the paper came out great! I'm always a fan of the handmade look (aka not perfect), so this style is right up my alley. I've already used up a good amount of the paper, so I might need to make more to wrap the rest!
We actually started this project over the weekend with a bunch of friends. Everyone had a great time cutting designs into the potatoes so we had tons of stamps to work with, but we didn't get very far with the actual wrapping paper making, since it's a bit of a tedious process and we had a few beers in us by that point, if you know what I mean. But, I stuck the potato stamps in a plastic bag in the fridge to keep them fresh, and came back to the project when I had a little more patience!
The ingredients: - Rolls of Scotch Postal Wrapping Paper (basically kraft paper) and Banner & Sign Paper (white) - Potatoes! I took this picture after making the wrapping paper, so they're already stained from the next ingredient... - Paint! I used some metallic gold and silver craft paint I picked up and my handy acrylic paints I've had since I started painting seriously in high school, which pretty much only get used for craft projects.
I also used some random plastic recycling stuff as a palette for the paint, and a brush to apply the paint to the potato stamps for a smoother look.
As far as cost goes, this is a pretty cheap project, especially if you already have some of the materials. Each roll of paper is 15 ft long, which I discovered goes a long way, and cost me $2.50 to $3.50 (depending on color) at my local art supply store. I already had everything else except the metallic paints, which were a couple dollars each from the same store. If you don't have any paint, you could just use regular craft paint rather than acrylic paint, and the plain colored stuff was cheaper than the metallics. It probably comes out to about the same price as buying cheap wrapping paper at Target or something, but I think the end product is much more exciting!
I also used some random plastic recycling stuff as a palette for the paint, and a brush to apply the paint to the potato stamps for a smoother look.
As far as cost goes, this is a pretty cheap project, especially if you already have some of the materials. Each roll of paper is 15 ft long, which I discovered goes a long way, and cost me $2.50 to $3.50 (depending on color) at my local art supply store. I already had everything else except the metallic paints, which were a couple dollars each from the same store. If you don't have any paint, you could just use regular craft paint rather than acrylic paint, and the plain colored stuff was cheaper than the metallics. It probably comes out to about the same price as buying cheap wrapping paper at Target or something, but I think the end product is much more exciting!
A couple years ago I made potato stamp gift tags and posted all about the process, so refer to that post here for the nitty gritty, but basically you just cut a design into a potato, get paint on it, and stamp it on the page! Easy peasy, though it does take A LOT of stamping to cover a whole piece of wrapping paper. I made some colorful patterns on the white paper...
And some white, silver, and gold designs on the brown paper! I would stamp the paper multiple times with each application of paint to potato, so there's some variation there--you can see the effect best in the "ho ho ho" paper in this picture. My theory is the paper looks a little nicer and less randomly crafty if you choose just one or two colors and one or two stamps per design, though you could totally prove me wrong on that front. Some stamps look better if you do them in an orderly fashion (like the rows of triangles), and others worked well spread randomly across the page.
And then I wrapped up some presents! Some of these are gifts for our families that got packaged up and shipped off yesterday, but we also have packages coming in the mail that have unwrapped presents from family inside, so I just wrapped up the whole box to put under our tree. I also cut up some watercolor paper and did single stamps on them for tags. I like how these colorful packages look with combo twine and matching bakers twine as ribbon. I didn't have a whole lot of ribbon to work with for the presents that twine didn't look good with, but I made do with what I had in our wrapping paper box. The little tiny present on the right has the same Christmas tree paper as the one on the left, but since it was only one little tree, I decided to "decorate" the tree with my chalk pens, which I think looks super cute.
Oh yeah. Throw in some vintage gift packaging we picked up at an estate sale last month, and we're looking good!
What do you think of our wrapping paper? Have you ever made your own gift wrap? Done any potato stamping? Any other cool ideas for making gift wrap? Now I need to get more creative with my gift toppers... I've seen some awesome ideas out there for that. Do you keep your gift wrap simple or do you do it up? Any other fun Christmas DIY projects going on? Share links in the comments!
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