I had done this for years without thinking about it and then, when I had to move out of state, I decided to dispose of the fairly large collection of used gift paper I had and boy, did I miss it last year! This is why I have decided to start again, and maybe tell y'all about it too.
You don't think about it from looking at it, but 90% or so of all gift wrapping paper is perfectly reusable. We all know that 3 out of 10 gifts (especially for items such as books and clothes) can be eased out of the wrapping with no visible damage to the paper, and that then one can ease a similar sized book or object and reuse the paper in that instance. But that figure quickly goes up when we go through the trouble of salvaging as much of the wrapping paper as one possibly can from one's gifts.
Besides the technique mentioned above, a thrifty person can use an Exacto knife and carefully cut out the tape when opening the package, and salvaging most or all of the wrapping paper on said gift. One can also tell one's family members to save the paper and be respectful of it when opening the gift. One can easily even salvage a lot of paper that has been abused by cutting out the intact bits. Think of the many small gifts we are apt to give, a gift card, lipstick, a box of Whitman's Samplers - for which that small but nice scrap is good!
At the end of the gifting event (ie. Christmas or baby shower) I take it all home, put a fun DVD in the player, get scissors, Exacto knife, and a box. As seen in the diagram, I undo all tape, straighten the paper out as much a I can, put like with like: large together, small together, Santa's together, etc. and roll them up for storage.
This practice saves a significant amount of money, but is also to me more respectful of paper and gift giving in general.
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I have a friend from the Netherlands and they have been doing this for years because they don't have an abundance of paper in his country. He said that most of Europe is this way with gift wrap. They also use their own shopping bags for food, etc. That was how it was when I lived in Austria back in the 50's.
Some of the paper I save is wrinkly looking. So to take care of that I just iron it with a cool iron. You can gradualy warm the iron up to see how warm you need when you iron the paper.
An old, old trick is to use the small torn pieces of colored tissue paper and crayons that have been shredded ( shaved with a knife) Layed on a sheet of waxed paper and covered with another and warm ironed to seal. These days you can use all kinds of crafty things to add, like glitter, feathers, curling ribbon, colored thread scrapes etc. Just look around to get inspired. GG Vi
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