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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

I'll be linking up at these link parties