Brown Paper Packages

I love brown. I know it makes me weird, but I absolutely love the color brown. Wood floors are brown. Coffee is brown. Six out of the ten rooms in my house are painted some shade of brown. Almost every piece of clothing I own is brown.

And so it makes sense that when it comes to gift giving, I choose to wrap packages in brown paper. It’s just so pretty!

I also really like to make things. Sadly, with the birth of Jeremiah, my available time for making things has been drastically reduced. (That makes it sound like I’m sad that Jeremiah was born– not true!) It’s just that any time for crafting has to be broken up into chunks of 30 minute intervals. All you mamas know… the meal-making and cleaning that it takes to keep a little person alive is sometimes overwhelming.

This year for Christmas I wanted to make all my lovely friends a gift that was really special. I won’t tell you what that was going to be because it turns out that I was overly ambitious and unable to actually make that happen. Instead, I changed course and decided to make them all something a little more manageable. I’m still not going to tell you what that is because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

Instead, I’m showing you them all wrapped up… because wrapping presents is just about my favorite part of Christmas. And this year I decided to make the bows, too! I used this tutorial and found it to be incredibly easy. Actually, that isn’t true. The first couple of bows I made didn’t turn out right and I think it’s because I am spatially challenged. It took me a while to figure out how to twist the paper so it would work each time– but now I have a system and now they are incredibly easy to make.

The tutorial suggests that you use magazine pages, but would you believe that we don’t have a single magazine in the house? I think I went a little crazy one year with decluttering and swore that we would never subscribe to a magazine or the newspaper again. And so, without magazine pages to use, I decided to get all creative. I tried scrapbook paper (too thick) and plain computer paper (kind of boring). I tried fabric (yeah, that didn’t work at all.) Then, I decided it would look cool to use pages out of a dictionary. But I couldn’t find one. What I did find, though, were my old college textbooks. And that is why I made bows out of organic chemistry textbook pages.

I think calculus bows are next… and I know a couple of people that actually might appreciate them!