Top 10 Money Saving Tips for Christmas - #3 Wrapping Paper

Christmas Wrap - originally posted by Paur + Anne 

I love wrapping presents almost as much as I love getting to unwrap them. What isn’t so great is the cost of all that wrapping paper, bows, ribbons, and gift cards. The best solution I have come up with is to get creative. Not only does this make wrapping far more fun, it can also help you to save money. Here are my top tips for saving money when wrapping presents:

Reuse and Recycle

Almost anything can be turned into great wrapping paper, especially when you use the right accessories. Some great examples include:

Newspaper; foreign papers work especially well, as do the cartoon pages. The FT can also look great accessorised with a black ribbon.

The pages from magazines can work really well for smaller presents, especially if you can match the theme of the present to the theme of the pictures.

Another good idea is to save you Christmas cards from the year before and use them to make gift tags for the  following year. You can normally find a nice image on the front of each card. All you need then is a sharp pair of scissors and a hole punch and you have a gift tag.

Get Creative

If you have children, getting them to create Christmas themed artwork on plain paper can create great wrapping paper, especially for doting grandparents, aunts and uncles. You can either  get them to decorate individual sheets of paper, or you can go an buy large rolls of brown wrapping paper, or white paper very inexpensively.

Even if you  don’t have children, you can get creative yourself. Block prints always work well. Often the more simple the design or pattern, the better it looks. You definitely don’t have to be the next Picasso to make this work.

Bows and bangles

The first rule here is don’t buy it unless you really have to. This is the perfect time to have a clear out and save some money at the same time. So many us have odd scraps of ribbon, buttons and pretty bits of fabric. All of these can be used with great effect to wrap Christmas presents.

If you must buy, then shop around. Lots of craft and fabric stores will sell odds and ends at reduced prices which can be perfect for wrapping those Christmas presents. And if you can be that organised, nothing beats shopping in January when prices will be at their lowest.

Best of the Rest;

One thing I am particularly keen on is highlighting posts from other bloggers that relate to my posts and that I believe are worthwhile additional reading. I plan on including these ‘Best of the Rest’ links is as many of my posts as a I can.

• Wise Bread: How to Wrap Gifts with Lefovers

• Money Saving Expert: Alternative wrapping paper

• Real Simple: How To Wrap Anything