6 DIY Gift Wrap Ideas for Men

If you can’t manage to make a gift for everyone on your holiday shopping list, you can always add a little personal touch by DIYing your own custom gift wrap. Not only do each of these relatively easy projects convey a handmade look and appeal, most of them can be specifically customized to the recipient, so you can be sure they’ll know you took the extra step. There are roughly a gajillion DIY gift wrap projects about online, so I picked five that could particularly work from a masculine perspective, whether you’re giving as or to a guy. 

And, don’t worry, there’s no animal hides or power tools required. Unless you want there to be…

1. Custom Photo Wrapping Paper – Use your own snapshots, Instagram pics, and otherwise meaningful imagery to print your own gift wrap. Get the full how-to from Photojojo

2. DIY Typographic Gift Wrap – This is the classic ManMade holiday tutorial, officially the biggest ManMade post of all time. Head here for the full how-to and for links to plenty of templates to whip this up in no time. 

3. Wood Grain Wrapping Paper – Brooklyn to West suggests using wood grain contact paper to wrap a gift, but if you really wanna go hardcore DIY, you can find a full how-to on how to paint your own here. 

4. Hand Drawn – A simple paint pen plus an inexpensive roll of kraft paper = infinite possibilities. Just create your own tongue-in-cheek guy imagery like robots, dinosaurs, whiskey bottles, and brass knuckles. Get the full how-to from Minieco. 

5. Reuse a Security Envelope – The Gifted Blog suggests flipping a security envelope inside out and revealing its dense, modern pattern to wrap smaller gifts.

6. Recycle It – Lastly, if your recipient just can’t stand the idea of spending money on paper to hide a gift, use old calendar pages, posters, mailers, or the classic newspaper to give your recyclables one more chance at usefulness. DIY: Wrap in Paper at Scandinaviandeko.

[Top photo by Shovelling Son. Licensed under Creative Commons]