Happy Birthday Odette {and lots of birthday ideas!}

Happy birthday to this gorgeous girl. My beautiful sister. My 10 year old sister.

Today is her birthday and I am so happy to be celebrating with her! She is a great sister (yeah, sometimes horrible, but that's what sisters are) and I love her so much! I have never met anyone so stylish, artistic and kind to absolutely everyone.

In honour of her birthday, I have so much fun, birthday goodness to share with you!

First up, gift wrapping! I have a thing for beautifully wrapped presents. Mum might be able to give someone a gift in a plastic bag, but not me. There is something about a beautifully wrapped present that makes me smile. It feels like someone has gone the extra just for you. Oh yes, and they look better under the Christmas tree!

Here are two very simple and easy ways to wrap presents that look beautiful and professional. Side note - when wrapping these "presents" I deliberately chose items that were easy to wrap. Try to make a wrapped up basketball look pretty... not an easy task. That's why I love gift boxes! You can put any awkward object into a box and it will be so much easier to wrap! It will also be a bit harder for the recipient to guess what might be under the wrapping paper...

Simple and Elegant

This look was so easy to create but looks so glamorous!

For the main wrapping paper, I used scrapbook paper. It is a great way to create an individual look when wrapping small presents. Yes, it is a bit harder than your average wrapping paper, but it can give you so much more creativity (especially when you have a huge scrapbook paper collection like me).

Then I used your everyday general purpose house string to wrap around the gift. You did just hear me say, everyday general purpose house string. I say just use what ya got. It could have looked so much more glamorous with beautiful ribbon, but I didn't have any thin white ribbon so I used what I had. And it still turned out awesome.

I love gift tags. For this cute love heart shaped one, I freehandedly cut out a love heart from cardstock and then created a cute white dotted border with white nail polish. Yep, nail polish. Did I not say, use what ya got? I just dipped the end of a wooden skewer into the bottle and dotted my way around the edge of the card. Of course, if you want, you could use a white gel pen or paint. You know, only if you're normal.

Don't those beads just do it though? I just chose two sets of three different beads of differing sizes and then threaded them through the  string before tying the end so they didn't fall off. Thankfully, the smaller bead was tight enough on the string that it didn't slip around. If you're beads do slip though, I could suggest tying a knot at the other end of the beads too.

Natural and "Booky"

This look took a bit more of an effort, but the results are worth it!

I used this beautiful natural looking wrapping paper with an elegant white pattern as the base. At the moment, brown and beige papers prettied up with ribbons and tags and other cute embellishments is really in.

Over the wrapping paper, I wrapped a book page around the centre. Older books that can be found at second hand stores (or maybe in a box in your attic) are best for this. First, choose a book that is cheap. It will probably be cheap because no one wants to read it, some pages are missing and the remaining pages are yellow. That means it is perfect for what you want. I looked at a few books before choosing the one I did. Others seemed not good enough because their pages were too white and their fonts too modern. Truthfully, my book was from our bookshelf. But it was a book that I swear no-one has read in over 10 years. And I only used the "acknowledgements" page just in case. Say it with me now, you gotta use what ya got.

See that cute little name tag? It took a little bit of time because I typed it up on the computer and then printed it directly onto cute wood looking scrapbook paper, before cutting it into the shape I wanted. Of course to save time, handwriting the name tag would work just as well. It just depends what you want to do! I stuck into onto the wrapping paper with double sided tape or glue, I can't remember any more! Both ways would work though. Positioning it so that it is between the book page and wrapping paper is genius because I think it makes the transition between the two different papers flow easier.

To top it off, I tied a ribbon around and secured it with double sided tape. Now you've got a present set to impress! Of course, the book page could be substituted by something else like music notes, a cute drawing or even a photo. Use your imagination!

My other ideas were going to be in this post too but it's getting a bit too long so you'll have to stay tuned and look forward to them later in the week!

For now... Happy Birthday Detsy Boo! xx

P.S. You should all complete my survey if you haven't done so yet! See post below for all the details..