Wrapping it up: Making your own wrapping paper

I have been buying Christmas (and Sinterklaas, a Dutch tradition) presents over the last few days and really felt like doing some wrapping. I have been using, and loving, plain old kraft packing paper to wrap up presents. Pimping them with colourful ribbon and tags. Occasionally I had also stamped on the kraft paper with kids alphabet stamps. I'd personalize the paper by stamping the birthday boy or girl's name all over it, quite a hit I can tell you;-)

So today I wanted to try something a bit more sophisticated for a grown up Christmas present. I decided to stamp a pattern of two different Christmas stamps in bright white ink. I really love how the bright white contrasts against the brown kraft paper.

Here's how I did it:

You need: Kraft packing paper (post office or office supply store), stamps and good opaque white stamping ink.

1. Spread out the paper
2. Pick out a stamp
3. Ink up the stamp really, really well. It really pays off to ink the stamp (and not push the stamp onto the ink).
   
4. Stamp away, generously re-inking after every print you make. I did mine in relatively straight and evenly spaced lines as it seemed to fit with the clean images I was stamping but of course you can do it any way you like. I would recommend you keep the pattern quite tight so you can see it well ones you have actually wrapped something with it. 
5. Leave it to dry for a while as the paper is quite glossy and not so porous. I ended up using a heat gun to help it along a bit.
6. If you like your images to really pop out (and have lots of time) you can choose to emboss them with white embossing ink. It will look great. I made a few tags and embossed those and you can really see the difference. 
7. Wrap up your goodies....