Not everyone has someone to teach them how to wrap and prepare gifts properly. As it turns out, not all of us are very arts-and-crafty. You may walk into an arts and crafts store and get dizzy from being overwhelmed with all the colorful paper, ribbon, and decorations.
We’re here to help you by simplifying it and giving you some ideas on using a simple but effective gift decoration: colored tissue paper. At first, you may not realize it, but tissue paper is handy for adding another layer of pizzaz to your gifts with minimal effort – you need to know how to make the best use of this convenient decoration.
Without further ado, here is how you can use tissue paper in your gift wrapping endeavors.
Making The Best Of What You Have
When you’re looking to package or wrap gifts, tissue paper is a handy way to add color and texture to your presentation. However, it’s very easy to overdo and have much of your effort go to waste when someone ends up tearing through it all to reach the gift.
More does not equal better when it comes to tissue paper. When you’re looking to use colored tissue paper, make sure you take a sheet and unfold it fully, and you may be surprised by the volume of one sheet. Granted, the size does matter in this case, but generally, you’ll be folding, crinkling, or wrapping your gift somehow, and this can take up quite a bit of space and add some weight to the present, making your gift box look fuller.
Mixing and matching colors can also be an excellent way to spruce things up, especially if you use complementary colors or light pastel colors. Again, be sure not to overdo it and make something garish. You’ll want to create something pretty to look at that isn’t intrusive or harsh on the eyes in any way. Our recommendation is to stick to two colors maximum when decorating with tissue paper.
Be careful when unfolding your tissue paper, as it’s fragile and prone to wrinkling and tearing.
Lining The Box
There are a variety of ways you can use tissue paper when preparing your gifts. Before we move onto some examples, we will cover some general ideas that might spark some creativity and give you some inspiration when it comes to using tissue paper.
The easiest way you can use tissue paper is to place it inside the gift box. Now, you can’t just stuff it in there and call it a day, as that can be messy and come off as lazy. You’ll have to find a tasteful way to place it inside, using space effectively. This can depend on the gift and the box itself, so make sure to start with one sheet and work from there.
An excellent way to start is by lining the gift box with some tissue paper. Loosely folding gives you some nice padding and adds some volume to the gift, and is an excellent way to fill up the empty space. Depending on the size of the gift box and gift itself, you may need to use more than one sheet, but if you’re clever with how you space things out, you may get away with using one if it’s a smaller box.
Place your gift on top, and you’ve created a nice, colorful base to frame your gift. You can add some purposely crinkled-up pieces of paper around the gift between the box’s walls for some cushioning and then add a clean layer on top to hide the gift.
Wrapping The Gift
If you want to go a few steps further than simply lining the box and covering the gift, you could use tissue paper as a form of gift wrap. It can work surprisingly well and is a great way to incorporate different colors. Wrapping the gift in tissue paper will, of course, cause the box to be more of a protective measure for the fragile tissue paper, but it gives you the chance to show off some cool gift wrapping skills you may have learned.
But for those who aren’t as confident in their gift-wrapping skills, here is a straightforward but nice way to wrap a gift with tissue paper. Just remember to be careful as it is easy to tear the thin paper.
This method uses multiple sheets of paper and different colors, and we encourage you to match colors to the gift or event/season. If you aren’t sure, white and some other light pastel color works well as a default fallback. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use white, pink, and red for the explanation.
Take your white tissue paper and loosely wrap the gift. The keyword is “loosely,” as this minimizes tearing. Fragile gifts may require more layers of wrapping for some added cushioning, but remember that we’ll be adding more layers shortly.
Next, you’ll want to take your pink and red tissue paper and layer them on a flat surface. Start with a single red piece placed flat, and then place a pink piece on top, rotated 45 degrees. Place another pink piece on top, rotated 22.5 degrees. This should create an overlapped effect with each corner of each sheet visible. Depending on the size of the gift, you may want to add more sheets, but we’ll be leaving it at three for this explanation.
Place your white tissue paper-wrapped gift in the center of your layered colored paper and begin gathering the corners. Take each opposite corner and pull upwards, meeting them and loosely folding them on top of the gift. Once you’ve folded each of the corners up, you can gently place the gift in the box.
Wrapping Up
Tissue paper is wonderfully simple to incorporate into your gifts and can add quite some flair with pretty colors and textures. Whether you’re wrapping a gift or lining a box, always be sure not to go overboard and use just what you need, as tissue paper can easily take up a lot of space. Also, remember to be careful not to wrinkle or tear the fragile paper, and you can easily add some extra flair to your gifts.
