Gift wrapping just got innovative : Second Part, Leaf and fabric wonders

For those of you who loved the post about Lalitha Menon's creative gift wrapping that is earth friendly too, here is more from her loving heart, thinking head and quicky hands.

In my earlier post about her work, you saw how she used banana leaves, cinnamon and Inja tree bark to wrap her simple yet thoughtful gifts.

Here are pictures from her recent gifting:

The picture is self explanatory. A glass jar of payasam or sweet porridge made with vermicelli. A piece of banana leaf to seal the jar mouth better and the lid to top. With absolutely no need of any other gift bag or wrapping paper, she fastened a satin ribbon around the lid. Whew! Economical yet creative! And no hiding of the yummy payasam!

Now for the next one:

It's an exquisite soap bar from Fabindia. Guess what's its wrapping paper! A piece of a Kerala dhoti. Here is how she wrapped it.

She added, rather strung wooden beads in for some more decor.

You can imagine a hundred things that could be in the pictures below.

The huge leaf in question is a teak tree leaf. Cannot imagine the size, is it not? Just google ` teak tree leaf'. I was surprised by the amazing size these leaves could grow to.

Here though, the leaves available in her garden have been used to make a lovely gift wrap for, a shirt. Lalitha pinned their edges carefully with coconut sticks which are common in Kerala too. She then wrapped its middle with the piece of a Kanchipuram saree. Hanging roots from the teak tree served as twine to tie the package up. But what amazed me was how the guava leaf and some dried flowers served as such good embellishments!

The most unusual of objects, sometimes even aging leaves that fell off the tree, can be thrown in to give a dramatic effect for your creative output! There is of course that glittery ribbon to top the pointed ends, but I guess the gift wrap would have looked good even without it.

Now for more! What you see in the picture below is actually brown paper (yeah, it is neither white nor off-white) and a saree border to give it the feel of a folded saree, leaves from the garden taped to the brown sheet.

It has been used to wrap a book gift.

Lalitha used some more border, for a bookmark to accompany the book gift. I love this, because I believe every book deserves a bookmark.

Check out: http://imprintshandmade.blogspot.com/2012/03/saree-border-bookmarks.html
Here, she stuck the piece of saree border on to a cardboard, and used the purple satin to give it a base. On it's upper end, she has punched a hole to string the ribbon piece through for a bow.

Look out for more - there is a part three to this post too! Thank you Lalitha, for your creativity that does not stop!

Pictures courtesy: Lalitha Menon

If you wish to use the pictures and content here, credit to Lalitha's pictures and Imprints Handmade's content is a must

Want handmade gifts with a difference?

A few days back, you got a glimpse of some really innovative gift wrapping by Lalitha Menon.
That was not all! Here is more from her. The gift occasion has been Christmas, but such ideas can be used for practically any time of the year.

Does the following picture remind you of Easter egg hunting? Or simply looks like a bird nest that lost its way to an office desk?

Lalitha Menon, the ever-so experimenting gifter, has done a lot of work here. She emptied the contents of egg-shells by making a tiny hole at one end carefully. She then washed and dried the egg-shells.

What followed, needed more dexterity. She filled small pieces of muslin with cloves, cardamom and cinnamon, tied each with a ribbon, and gently pushed it into different shells. She sealed the shells with white tape.

The nest, she made with Inja - a tree bark that is easily available in the ayurvedic shops of Kerala, India. And used a ribbon for the gift effect. So spices in the muslin are the gift. They can be pulled out and placed between clothes. And Inja is a superb body scrub! I bet it makes for a gift from nature, and far less expensive than the expensive body scrubs from big buck stores

Here is another one from her desk:

It's simply a gift placed inside an empty coconut shell - rather two shells of a coconut. The coconut was sealed by wrapping with tissue paper, and using a ribbon to hold the two halves. The post-it note reads -- `A great ostrich laid an egg just for u @ my farm!!'

And now for some patience:

Never thought you would pull out some cotton from the First Aid box or your medicine shelf for gift wrapping did you?

``The idea here was to rag the receiver, so it takes some time to unwrap the gift,'' says Lalitha Menon. Sure enough, the gift was wrapped with cotton at both edges and the center filled with colourful rubber bands.

The words on her post-it note read: `Santa ran out of `wrapping paper in the North pole...''

Wow, what a Christmas gift!

Pics by Lalitha Menon