Gift Wrap Tips and an Easy DIY Gift Bag

I LOVE wrapping gifts. I love wrapping the gifts I buy more than I love shopping for them. Part of that may be due to my getting so much of my gift wrap from the dollar store. There is nothing worse for me than looking at gift wrap at places where you tend to buy more gifts (for me, that's Baby's 'R Us, Target, etc... I have a different gift registry to look at once a month at the least at this point in my life). If you really wanna go all out, you could end up spending almost as much on wrapping the gift as you did on the gift itself. Throw in a card from one of those places, and you've easily busted your budget.

Do what I do: Make the extra trip to Dollar Tree.

Wrapping Paper
Of course, like anything else at the dollar store, you have to be a little careful about quality and quantity, especially with wrapping paper. You need to check your footage on the rolls. Sometimes you're simply buying a dollar's worth of wrapping paper you could get anywhere else because it's a small quantity. You also need to be careful with the quality as well. I bought some wrapping paper that was pretty cute for a baby shower:

Gotta love the baby elephants. You probably can't tell, but they're saying "Mama and Dada" and "GooGoo / GaaGaa" so I had to buy it. Unfortunately, when I got in on the present, it was basically transparent. Could totally see what the gift was. I just pretended it wasn't and hoped no one else would notice, put a bunch of ribbon on it and strategically placed the card, but I probably won't be buying this type of of wrapping paper again. I've also noticed that some wrapping paper I've bought wrinkles and tears much more easily than other wrapping paper.

Here is what to buy:

Dollar tree has several styles of this "brown paper bag" type wrapping paper with different designs. It's durable, wraps well, and I like this style, personally. I just bought another style I saw on my latest trip, although next time I need to get something a little less girly, which they usually have in a red-checkered print.

Gift Bags
You really can't go wrong with a gift bags at Dollar Tree, but I really like to get my money's worth by looking for two-packs. Again, they usually come in the brown paper bag material, but I like that.

One way I've learned to get a really unique looking gift bag is to buy a two pack of the brown paper bags and getting some of the cute three-dimensional stickers they also have there. It's as simple of a DIY as it gets (I'm not crafty enough to do anything other than simple DIYs....)

 Before

After

I feel like it gives you something really unique that's great for a gift. Add some tissue paper, which of course they sell for a dollar in HUGE packs at dollar tree. I had to restrain myself from the cute stuff they had last time I was there. I'm limited in space, or else I'd have an entire room dedicated to wrapping paper and my teaching supplies. Some day....