DIY Brown Paper Christmas Wrapping Ideas

By Jenny Mugridge

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1 Dec 2021, 15:25:00

A selection of DIY wrapping paper ideas made from brown wrapping paper

Get inspiration for the festive season with our gorgeous range of child-friendly and eco-friendly brown paper Christmas wrapping ideas – perfect under the tree!

There’s nothing more magical than a big pile of presents just waiting under the Christmas tree for their time to shine! And while we love all kinds of wrapping, it’s sometimes fun to go back to basics, which is why this year we’re taking you through our favourite brown paper Christmas wrapping ideas.

Potato Print Wrapping Paper

Do you remember this craft from your childhood? It’s a surprisingly simple way to create a gorgeously rustic print all over your wrapping paper!

What you’ll need:

The first step is definitely for adults only!

Cut your potato in half, then draw your design onto one of the sides – you might find you need to dig in to make an impression as it’ll be too wet for ink!

When you’re happy with your design, cut around the edges to 5-10mm depth and discard the pieces that aren’t part of your shape. You don’t want to get rid of everything that isn’t the pattern or you’ll have less to hold onto!

This is the way we did it, but there is another way: by using stencils, you don’t need to work so hard to get the design right! All you need to do is get your stencil and press down hard onto the potato so that it sinks in. Then cut everything around the stencil to a depth of 5-10mm.

You can even use a paper template to get your shape. Draw it out on your piece of paper, then centre the design over your potato. Use a paperclip tip to poke holes along the edges of the design, so that when you remove the paper the outline of the pattern is already there. Take your knife to finish off the design as we did above.

Choose the colour for your potato print

We went with a classic green for our Christmas tree, but you can have fun experimenting with different colours! Just remember that you’ll need to print with one colour at a time so you don’t make a horrid brown mess.

Either allow the potato to sit and dry or pat it gently with a paper towel to take off most of the excess moisture. This will make it easier for the paint to stick to your potato, and to get more stable images.

You can add paint either by brushing it on with a paintbrush, using a small paint roller or squeezing some paint out onto your paper plate and dipping the potato in there.

Once the paint is on, you can get printing! Load your potato stencil up with paint and then press it firmly down on the brown paper, holding for 3-5 seconds. Lift off the potato very slowly to avoid smudging, and you should see a perfect replica of your design appear!

It’s totally up to you if you’d rather print the paper before wrapping or after!

Some people find it easier to do after, once you know how much surface area needs to be covered. Others find it difficult to get a consistent pattern when edges are involved and like to print a large flat piece of paper before wrapping. Do what works for you.

And look how beautifully it came out! Perfect with some red paper raffia.

DIY Christmas Lights Wrapping Paper

Another one for you that the kids will love getting involved in – mostly because it means they can get messy painted fingers! Here’s how we got a beautiful homemade Christmas tree light design on our Kraft brown paper.

You’ll need:

Start by taking your Sharpie or other black pen and drawing a continuous line that loops on itself a few times. This will be MUCH easier to do with the paper lying flat.

Decide which colours you’d like for your Christmas lights. We went with red, yellow, blue and green but feel free to do the recipient’s favourite colours – or even your own!

Empty the paints out onto a paper plate, keeping them all separate. All you need to do now is get the kids to help out by donating their thumbprints to the cause!

They need to put their thumb firmly into one of the puddles of paint. Warn them that it’ll probably feel quite cold!

Once they’ve coloured their thumb, guide them in setting their thumb down around where the swirly line you’ve drawn already is. Repeat over and over with different colours until you’ve got what looks like a gorgeous string of lights on your paper!

Use your newly decorated paper to wrap up your gift, then if you like you can choose a coloured Sharpie to draw a special message along one of the strings.

Washi Tape Bunting

Jazz up your plain brown wrapping paper with an adorable string of washi tape bunting! This idea is so silly and cute, but really easy to do – you’ll be hanging washi tape bunting on everything soon!

You’ll need:

Start by taking a piece of string that’s a little bit longer than the width of your parcel – or alternatively, a few times the width of your parcel for a wrap-around look.

You can lay the string out flat on the table to work on, or you could use some washing pegs to hang the string up between two objects and then work along it. This ensures all your flags are hanging the same way!

Cut a piece of washi tape around 2cm long and wrap it around the string so that it doubles on itself and creates a 1cm long rectangle. Now you can cut it into whatever bunting shape you’d like – whether that’s the classic triangular pennant, a swallowtail with a cut-out triangle, or a shield-like shape by cutting a triangle into the very end, leaving some square length at the top.

Depending on how long you cut your string, you can now wrap your bunting around your gift or tape it at each end on one side of the gift. This is a great way to jazz up any oddly-shaped presents!

Thanks for reading, we hope you loved our ideas! For more craft ideas and party ideas, stay on our blog. Alternatively, check out our Christmas shop!