IKEA Cactus Gift Wrap

When I bought a cute little gift box trio of cacti in IKEA for my Dad's birthday I knew the packaging was perfect for a little fun gift wrapping.

Ikea cactus gift wrap

First I want to apologise if this little trio of plants is not available in IKEA where you live. I've been trying to work out on-line which countries they have these in. If you don't have them yet, maybe just pin for later ?!? 

Anyway, I bought a trio for my Dad for his birthday and didn't just want to wrap them in paper, in case he tipped it the wrong way up, and just a bow didn't seem to quite cut it. The cactus is a desserty kind of plant so I thought a little dessert scene would be fun.

First I removed the prickly plants from the packaging and removed the label.

remove label.jpg

Oh IKEA, why such sticky glue for your labels? I have some great stuff called "Sticky Stuff Remover" which worked a treat, but I've heard people use peanut butter, baby oil or nail varnish remover.

Next I popped on over to Picmonkey (Picmonkey is no longer free to use so I mostly use Ipiccy now) and made a Happy Birthday Dad picture, in a font which I think is called Santes Durnant or maybe Dumant???

I printed that onto bright blue paper.

what you need.jpg

I've shown a couple of different yellow scrap book papers here, I didn't use them all in the end, these were just my possibles.

I cut the blue paper roughly to fit in the plastic packaging, then just pushed it into place, scoring with my fingers to get a good fit.

adjust to fit.jpg

Once the blue paper was trimmed to size I glued on a yellow paper circle to be the sun. Then I secured the blue paper on the inside back of the packaging with glue dots.

I trimmed another piece of sandy coloured scrapbook paper to be a deserty bit on the front, added a few doodles which are supposed to look like rocks, sand dunes and dessert type plants and then attached that to the packaging front again with glue dots.

glue dots.jpg

To finish I popped the plants back in, punched a couple of holes in the very top and threaded a length of blue ribbon to make a handle. It needed double knots to secure it, a longer length of ribbon forming a double handle might have been better on reflection!

Ikea cactus gift wrap
Ikea cactus packaging.jpg
new sig 1.png

I'll be linking up at these link parties