The other night I was flipping through some channels and came across a show called Wrap Battle.  It is an elimination-style competition show about wrapping presents.  At first I thought:  What is this?!  Then I was a little sad because I love gift giving and making a competition out of it seems wrong on so many levels.  And then I became a little more interested because in this episode, they were discussing the art of wrapping presents using three traditional Japanese techniques:

Furoshiki are a type of traditional Japanese wrapping cloth.  They can be used to wrap goods for travel and everyday or be more decorative cloth to wrap gifts.

Tsutsumi a type of origami / paper folding which are pleated designs with paper which then can be used to wrap presents or applied to a present as a topper similar to a ribbon bow.

Origami is the art of paper folding and, I think, the one with which most of us will be familiar.  On the show, however, they focused not only on making little objects out of paper, but paper containers with beautiful paper tops to put other items inside.

I thought it was wonderfully interesting and it sent me down a little internet rabbit hole with YouTube teaching videos and Wikipedia pages and beautiful images of wrapped items.

After participating in Giftmas for the first time this year (Thank you, Jaye!) and seeing that all of you are awesome gift givers, I thought it would be nice to have a place where we could exchange gift ideas for the hard-to-gift loved ones in our lives.  With just a few weeks before the December holidays are here, some of us might already be feeling some anxiety over finding that perfect gift for that perfect person.  Have fun!!

Header image from Shiho Masuda’s instagram page: shihomasuda_giftwrapping