Easy Homemade Christmas Wrapping Paper Ideas

Homemade Christmas wrapping paper is eco-friendly and easy to make. You can get all the materials you need for free or for cheap. There are many different types of recycled paper that you can use in your homemade Christmas wrapping paper project. You can even make bows and ribbons out of recycled paper.

Brown Wrapping Paper

Get a brown paper bag, some assorted rubber Christmas stamps and ink pads. As an alternative to the ink pads, you can use acrylic craft paints diluted with water or acrylic matte medium. If you don't want to buy Christmas stamps, cut some potatoes in half and carve Christmas designs such as Christmas trees, stars, snowflakes, snowmen and ornaments in the cut ends. Take the paper bag apart and stamp the paper with the designs using red, green, blue and gold ink. Customize your homemade wrapping paper by stamping it with designs you know your recipient likes.

Newspaper Wrapping Paper

The comics pages make great homemade wrapping paper, especially for gifts for young children. You can also use ad pages, fashion pages and sports pages also make customized wrapping paper. Get the desired section out of your most recent Sunday newspaper. Use an iron on low heat to remove the creases from the paper. After you wrap your Christmas gift in the newspaper, then tie your gift with ample amounts of recycled ribbon and a gift tag made out of a recycled Christmas card or recycled Christmas wrapping paper. You can also make bows out of recycled wrapping paper.

Sheet Music Wrapping Paper

Sheet music makes great personalized homemade Christmas wrapping paper for musical gifts. For example, you can wrap a music CD, a musical instrument or books about music in sheet music. Find some old sheet music that is still crisp and white. If necessary, iron out any creases with an iron on a low setting. You can use single sheets of music to wrap small gifts. For larger gifts, carefully tape the sheet music pages together at the edges using transparent tape.

Magazine Wrapping Paper

Tape together some sheets of scrap paper. Misprints from your computer printer will work well, as will any other 8" by 11 1/2" paper, such as advertising flyers. Cut out attractive Christmas images from old glossy magazines you're not longer interested in reading. Use a glue stick to adhere them to the taped-together scrap paper to create homemade Christmas wrapping paper.

Map Wrapping Paper

Maps make great homemade wrapping paper for history, travel and geography enthusiasts. Personalize your homemade wrapping paper by getting a used map that matches your recipient's interests. If your recipient loves nature, get a map of a local national or state park. If he is into science, get an old topographical map. If your recipient has always dreamed of traveling overseas, get a map of a beautiful European location.

Be sure to save wrapping paper and ribbon each Christmas so that you can use them in future recycled wrapping paper projects. For more ideas on this topic, read Paper-less Christmas Gift Wrapping Ideas.