It’s one thing to put the thought into buying the perfect present for your loved one, special friend, or your boss. It’s another thing entirely to then wrap that gift in paper that you’ve decorated yourself, maybe with a handmade card to go with it.
In my family, we used to save the Edmonton Journal comics pages back when they were a separate section and printed in colour. It was cheap, plentiful and provided a modicum of reminiscence as you could review your favourite comic strips while you get a second present wrapped within it at the same time.
But these days, I tend to put more value on the wrapper itself. Maybe it’s because I hang around so many of this city’s finest artists that I see the beauty and the hard work that goes into paper crafts.
Here at the St. Albert Gazette, you can get a roll of paper for a few bucks. It’s the ideal way to try your hand at some homemade arts and crafts in the last week before Christmas. At home, all that’s needed to turn that blank unbleached canvas is things like dried flowers, string, tempera paint and a potato stamp.
If you’ve never made such a stamp, take a raw potato and cut it in half. Carefully cut a simple design like a star or a tree into the flesh and cut away the outside so only the design remains. You could try a cookie cutter too if you have one small enough. Now dip this design onto a stamp pad, paint it, or even try using markers to turn it into different festive colours.
There! Now just stamp that onto the paper any which way you like, just as you would with a regular rubber stamp. It’s so easy that any adult or child can do it as my nephew Caleb can attest. If you like – as he did – then you can also add your own illustrations to further ameliorate the overall pattern. Thumbprints work well too for an easy polka dot effect.
St. Albert photographer Natalie Mikus knows that such projects not only increase the significance of the gift, she said that they also have the added benefit of bringing arts education to the kitchen table, even if the result isn’t akin to a Manet.
“For my family, it’s just about involving the kids and making sure that they know that perfect is in the eye of the beholder,” she said. “Their grandmothers are going to like messy wrapping paper and weird tape a heck of a lot more than perfectly wrapped perfect bows nonsense that I would make.”
She said that her two children aged three and six were in charge of making the gift tags this year. The elder of the two led the charge, of course, and the art supplies are user-friendly even if they’re far from professional quality.
“Literally, it’s just crayons and she’s written names and whatnot on all the gifts. I’ve got a box with ugly masking tape on it under my tree right now.”
It’s not just her kids that have all the fun either. Mikus gets involved herself too. She even joined her children in attending an arts session at 4Cats on Akins Drive. There, they made their own wrapping paper. They made a big mess at the same time too, just like everyone else there. That’s part of the fun.
“I was covered in paint at the end of that, that’s for sure.”
If you’re keen to spend a little extra time on your gift paper or greeting card, you could learn a thing or two from Bev Bunker. The painter has recently become quite involved in a Brazilian paper craft called Pergamano. She said that it used to be primarily for religious iconography but has recently become adapted for secular arts and crafts as well.
It’s a more involved process that requires a lot of tools for embossing and perforating work, along with other art materials including special vellum-like paper.
It takes a fair bit longer but the results show. Because of the work involved, her productivity does get cut down a bit, she admits.
“I don’t do too many. Some of the cards I make take up to 16 hours to do one card.”
A Christmas card with a Santa face surrounded by wintry swirls was one of her quicker accomplishments. Just a few hours, she said.
The look makes it stand out among all of the other cards.
“It can get very lacy looking. Being that I’m an artist, I like to play around with it doing my own stuff from time to time. I like to do it; you can get a product that’s very unique in a short period of time, relatively,” she laughed. “Some of these almost take as much time as a painting, believe it or not.”
“When people get these as a gift, or along with a gift, they do not throw them away. They keep them because they know that they’re hand done.
Her work even earned her the attention of British card-making magazine, Parchment Craft to design works for them. One of her wedding cards has already been published. They also love her Queen for the Day card because it’s so different and unique, she noted.
Regardless, lots of people feel like a queen or a king when their gift has so much attention put to it.
