Mango and Passion Fruit: Great wrapping ideas using brown paper

I often get a bit upset when I am in a shop searching for wrapping paper and I can't find one that I consider appropriate for the gift, person or occasion. I recently had this problem with Olly's 30th birthday present. No box, bag or wrapping paper seemed to please me. None until I came across Nexttonicx, which had some very useful free printables.

Photo Credit: Nexttonicx

The paper bags are 135mm high x 90mm wide x 35mm deep and you can download 8 different templates by following this link. Blogger Nicola Pravato explains you can personalise them by writing the name of the person your gift is, as long as you have Adobe Acrobat, but I tried and you can also edit by opening the pdf on Photoshop.

Besides the bags, Nicola shares with us a pattern that she originally used to wrap chocolates but that I adapted to wrap dvds. For both bags & wraps all you will need is brown paper, a ruler and scissors to make sure you cut your paper in a size that fits your printer. I used sellotape to join my brown paper to a normal A4 sheet before printing just to make sure the brown paper wouldn't get stuck in the printer. I just joined the top of the sheets, there's no need to do sides or bottom.