Now this is a story all about how my gifts got wrapped by touch right now, and I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there, I'll tell you how to wrap gifts with the same kinda flair…
If the thought of wrapping Christmas presents with a sight condition is adding to your festive stress, we’re here to help. Claire, a mum of two primary-school age boys, who has been blind since the age of four, shares tips based on her own experience and “a few disasters”.
1. “Be organised. Before you do anything else make sure you’ve got the right gift to hand. Use Seeing AI, or Be My Eyes, or a human if you’ve got one at hand, to identify the presents, and then sort them into piles for each person. You can then wrap each person’s presents in one go.”
2. Handy tools to make wrapping easier include a tape dispenser, a thimble for cutting paper (for example, the Nimble which is worn on your finger, letting you slice through wrapping paper more easily than with scissors), gift bags for bottles and awkward shaped gifts, brown paper tape (if you’re wrapping with brown paper) – it’s much easier to feel the end of the tape on the roll.
A handheld braille labeller is a quick way to label presents with the recipient’s name.
3. To calculate how much paper you need for each gift, you can use this simple formula to be sure the length and width of your paper is enough...
You will need the length, width and height of the item to be wrapped. The length of paper will need to be two times item length plus two times item height, plus a little extra for overlap. The width of the paper will be the item width plus the item height, plus a little extra for the overlap. You may find our tactile ruler helpful at this stage.
4. Claire’s solution to the challenge of cutting wrapping paper (especially paper on a roll), is to lay the paper on a flat surface, ideally a table without a bevelled edge, and use the edge of the table as a guide to cut the paper straight. For really neat edges, you can fold in the cut edge before you tape it down, too.
5. “Place the gift right in the middle of the paper and use a tiny bit of tape to stop it moving around. Then fold in the paper, checking before taping.”
6. Use our Christmas sticker gift tags to label presents. Each pack contains six sheets of six brightly coloured braille stickers. With six festive designs in the pack, you can assign one design per person to make it easy to know who a present is for.
Each 5cm diameter sticker features a colourful, tactile Christmas graphic (a star, a Christmas gift, a bauble, for example) with a seasonal word in large print and uncontracted braille. Both the braille and print are white to stand out against the coloured background.
If you need more stickers, the Christmas sticker selection pack has 16 more brightly coloured, tactile stickers (two each of eight designs). You can also use stick-on bows to distinguish between gifts – the number and placement of the bows can be a way to ID gifts. You could also use different textures of ribbon and twine to make presents easier to identify.
Craft shops sell a wide selection of tactile festive ‘toppers’ that can also be used to make gifts distinctive – or you could add different shapes and sizes of button to a gift.
If you’re wrapping for your own children, then brailling a label to add to their Santa sack and/or stocking can be helpful (using the sack or stocking to keep presents together can also be helpful). For non-braillists, the RNIB PENfriend is another solution. If you don’t want to waste adhesive labels, the multi-coloured tags for PENfriend can be re-used after Christmas.
