Recycle Plastic Bags and Make Unique Gift Bows!

Wouldn’t you like to receive a gift that looks like this? I would, there’s something so very crafty and cute about it, and when the recipient discovers that your kids have made the wrapping paper (tutorial on that here) and you’ve made the bow from plastic bags, well they’ll be so bowled over they won’t want to open the package! And this idea came about thanks to a very nice reader Lynn that left a comment on my post about making coasters from fused plastic bags (found here), and took the time to explain this project. Of course it sounded great so I had to give it a try!

I was hoping to come up with some other brilliant paper wrapping idea to go with this bow, (I know some of you have seen this paper in a previous post), but nothing else complemented the bow so well.

Though I absolutely love the first one I showed you, these two examples are cute too. Well actually I don’t really care for the one on the left so much, it looks a bit too much like pepto bismal pink, but I wanted to show an example of the difference between bows made with thick bags and the beautiful tissue paper like effect you can achieve with thin food bags.

You’ll Need:

• plastic bags
• wire kitchen tie or string

How To:

1. Cut as many strips from the plastic bag as you can, strips should be about 1/2″ wide and the width of the bag, but experiment with strip width to see which look you like best. The pink bow was made from one medium sized heavy weight clothes store bag.
2. Firmly bind your bunch of strips in the middle, I used a wire kitchen tie.(photo above left)
3. Trim you bunch so edges are even (photo above right)
4. Fluff and separate strips from one another, and pull strips up towards center to form a pouf shape
5. That’s it! Now experiment with different types of bags, and my reader said that those red and white target bags work really nicely…..happy wrapping!

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