There is just no way around it. I suck at gift wrapping! When I wrap a present, it looks like the handiwork of a 5-year-old!

My thoughts about my gift wrapping abilities crystallized the other morning when I was wrapping Valentine’s presents for mr. strivingcynic. It seemed like it shouldn’t have been that complicated. I had gotten him sweaters. The sweaters were in boxes…easy to wrap, right? Agh. Wrong.

So what are my wrapping issues? In no particular order….

• unrolling the wrapping paper to the proper point (and before that, clearing the space on the kitchen table for it…I remember hearing that Candy Spelling had a gift-wrapping room in her mansion…and I say, if it helped her wrap gifts nicely..then so what?)
• cutting the paper….I can’t do it on a straight line…even when it’s got the guide lines on the back of the paper
•  my folds aren’t crisp
•  I end up curling the tape and having to separate it…and my hair always ends up under it
• the tape just looks ugly on the paper and is all over the place, the ends puff out because I can’t get them flat….
• not to mention when I rolled the roll right off the table and then had to roll up what had unrolled.

It might help to give you some visuals. Here goes.

bad cutting, bad folding, ugly tape

ugly tape...and it looks...bulge-y...

ugly tape...poor use of tape...bleah

sigh...it's the thought that counts?

When I was a teenager, many years ago, my mom worked at the gift wrapping counter at a department store. Need I explain that she wraps things beautifully? It makes me feel guilty to tear into them (but I manage). She would line everything up just so and it all looked so pretty, with just the right embellishment (and she knew all the ribbon tricks, too). I got the sense that she enjoyed making the package so pretty.

Me? By the time I was done wrapping these boxes…I was like a miserable adolescent…angry, upset, petulant, blowing the hair out of my face…then I thought…heh, this would be a good post topic and then….well, there has to be a better way for me (aside from declaring wrapping is environmentally unfriendly and refusing to wrap “on principle.”)

Here’s the thing…I have probably said on this blog and in other places that I’m pretty unskilled when it comes to making pretty things by hand. And this is true…but part of it is that I’m taking the easy way out…”I should have failed kindergarten,” I say…”I can’t cut, paste, fold, draw in a straight line.” And this is all true…but the fact is, I gave up trying a long time ago because it was easier for me to take a kind of pride in how bad I was (as I’ve mentioned before, I’m left-handed, so I tend to put a lot of this off to teachers who couldn’t deal with lefties…which is true [something else I've said before, one day I'll post on the trials of being a lefty..]). I could live with this…but the fact that I could feel myself getting angry wrapping presents I was happy and excited to give…that I didn’t like.

So, here’s an unofficial goal for the year…I’d like to improve my gift wrapping skills instead of reveling in my ineptitude. I suspect there are plenty of  nonintimidating web sites that give tips…I mean, there’s hope for me, right? That being said, I think I’m done with gift wrapping occasions until late spring. But still!

How are your gift wrapping skills? Is there an area in your life where you “revel in your ineptitude”?