The Mother of Inspiration

You know when you’ve got to get something done but at the last minute realize you don’t have what you need to finish?

That was my dilemma a few days back when faced with a ruined gift bag and a deadline to get it to it’s intended recipient. What resulted was a unique wrap I couldn’t have purchased.

I often buy like-new gift bags at thrift stores so I can have them on hand. At one point I found two beautifully pink, perfectly sized paper gift bags for practically nothing.

The dilemma was that the store staff had bundled the bags together using packing tape on the actual paper of the bag. Taking off the tape meant taking off the colored layer of the bag.

Great.

Necessity being the mother of inspiration, this is what I ended up doing.

I always have extra tissue paper as well so I gathered scissors, the tissue paper, and nail polish. The pink nail polish was intended to match the bag but it didn’t.  Oh well, live and learn. In your own project, you could use polish as a kind of glue, like I did, or pretty much any other kind of adhesive.

I folded a whole tissue paper into about a 2″ X 3″ square and and free cut the shape of heart. If you’re cutting a more complicated shape, like a star or flower, you may want to hold the folded paper together with a paper clip to prevent the multiple layers from shifting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I then painted the abraded part of the paper bag with the polish and stuck on one of the hearts. Layering successive hearts and polish helped create a multi-definitional look while it covered the ruined paper.

Unfortunately, the tissue paper is so thin, the polish showed through. Using double sided tape, I added an additional layer of hearts on the initial layer to cover the tell-tell adhesion.

The result is not perfect but I was happy I could use items just sitting around or that  would otherwise have been thrown away to produce something unique for my friend.

What ho for creativity!