Muumade - Fabric gift wrap

Gift wrapping is an opportunity for you to add a personal touch to a gift. Unfortunately, non-reusable gift wrap creates a lot of waste. To solve this dilemma, we stopped using paper gift wrap a few years ago and now use reusable fabric gift wrap.

Fabric is more flexible than wrapping paper and it does not crease easily. So you can be more playful when using fabric gift wrap. Above, I wrapped the gift using a wind mill fold, with a small decorative four-petal flower in the center.

To make fabric gift wrap, I recommend that you prepare various sized squares of different colored pieces of fabric. To give you an idea, we have a few squares of each of the following side lengths: 95 cm (38″), 65 cm (26″), 50 cm (20″), 40 cm (16″) and 30 cm (12″).

First, use pinking shears to cut the fabric to the desired size. The easiest way to prevent the fabric from fraying is to apply a thin layer of stop fray glue on the back side of the edges. (As you can see in the above photo, the glue makes the blue floral fabric look as though nothing was done to it after cutting!)

If you have a hem foot for your sewing machine, hemming around the edges is also an option (the pale pink stripe fabric above). Yet another possibility is to make zigzag stitches close to the edges, and then purposely fray the ends (the multicolored stripe fabric).

Gathering the fabric into the shape of a sack is an easy way to wrap oddly shaped objects like a stuffed animal. Place your gift in the center of fabric gift wrap and gather the fabric at the top. Then, simply tie the loose ends together with a ribbon.

The candy wrapper style (see the blue floral fabric wrap in the first photo) is another cute option.

I also made some simple fabric bags for easier wrapping. The bag in the above photo is perfect for something small and special!

For more fabric gift wrapping ideas, you may find How_to_use_Furoshiki (MOE, Japan) interesting. Furoshiki is a type of traditional Japanese wrapping cloth used to transport objects, including gifts. A beautiful book titled, How to Wrap Five Eggs, is also an inspirational resource for packaging ideas.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in upcycling some used paper bags to add more variety to your gift wrapping. If so, click on the photo to go to my post on upcycled paper bags.