Top tips for gift wrapping from M&S

This is a commissioned post in collaboration with M&S.

I absolutely love Christmas and my preparations start early so I can really enjoy December and all the fun events leading up to Christmas Day with my family. Because I love Christmas I am happy to do as much of the planning and shopping as I can (much to my husband’s relief!).

I love to experiment with my wrapping so was delighted to be invited to an M&S Christmas wrapping event a few weeks ago. One evening I found myself outside a gorgeous old house in Soho Square, knocking on a door decked with the most amazing Christmas wreath. Inside I was led into a room decorated with a gorgeous Christmas tree, piles of gifts, git wrap and even some festive Percy Pigs! M&S had gathered a group of bloggers to help wrap some gifts for the children and parents who will be at Great Ormond Street Hospital this Christmas, using some gorgeous M&S wrapping paper, gift tags and ribbons. I love wrapping but there were some tricky shaped gifts to wrap.

Luckily we all swapped our top tips for those awkward gifts and were shown a couple of ingenious ways of wrapping tricky items. One of my favourite was the pleated wrap, but there was also a way of adding a pocket which is perfect for slipping a card inside (perfect for all those school birthday parties we get invited to), and also a lovely DIY gift wrap bag.

I enjoy wrapping so had a lovely evening and met some great bloggers too. I was so happy to be wrapping gifts for Great Ormond Street. I wasn’t aware that M&S even donated gifts to them at Christmas but there was a member of the GOSH team who told us all about the work they do and how the M&S partnership really makes a difference at this time of year.

 

I went home with lots of ideas and later picked a couple of M&S products to wrap with their lovely Nordic Christmas Tree wrapping paper at home. My mum loves adult colouring so I chose a fun Millie Marotta magazine file and Colouring Mug which came with 6 dual-tipped pens. These were pretty tricky to wrap but I was able to use some of the tips in the M&S Wrapping Guide they have up on their website.

The YouTube videos are really helpful and I admit to watching them a couple of times to make sure I got the technique right. My mum will never guess what’s inside these!