How to Wrap Absolutely Any Gift (Even If You’ve Run Out of Tape or Paper)

The holidays are here, which means you have a lot of stuff to do. You have to make travel plans to visit loved ones, hosting plans for visiting loved ones, party plans, shopping plans, cleaning plans, decorating plans, and every other kind of plan. While most of these plans are well within a grown adult’s capabilities, there’s one plan that confounds even the smartest people: wrapping all those gifts.

If you’ve ever sat down to wrap a mountain of gifts only to have a nervous breakdown some unknown time later when you run out of tape, you know how surprisingly stressful the gift-wrapping process can be. Even simple, classic boxes can turn out looking like you wrapped them in a dark room after a long day—and oddly shaped gifts can often seem impossible. But don’t despair—wrapping gifts, even those with non-standard packaging (or no packaging at all), is easier than you think.

How to wrap a gift

First things first: the fundamentals. If your approach to wrapping gifts is to haphazardly apply wrapping paper with gobs of tape, resulting in what holiday scientists call abominations, rejoice: Wrapping a traditional box-shaped gift is actually easy once you know the basic approach, and there are plenty of gift wrapping hacks and ideas out there if you’re looking to up your wrapping game or facing a specifically challenging gift shape.

Classic methods

The easiest way to wrap a gift is to put that gift into a traditional square or rectangular box, if you can. That way you can employ the classic approach:

1. Place the box face-down on the back of the wrapping paper, still attached to the roll. You should have enough paper on either side to come up about three-quarters of the height of the box.
2. Fold the free end of the paper over the box until it can fold over the other end of the box and touch the back of the paper.
3. Cut your paper, adding a three-inch margin past the edge of the box.
4. Trim the paper so you have the same margins all around.
5. Flip your box so it’s face-up.
6. Fold about two inches of paper over the top of the box on the shorter side and secure with tape.
7. Pull the other side over the top of the box and secure with tape. For extra style points, you can fold it under itself and use double-sided tape to create a neat seam instead of a taped edge in the middle of the box.
8. On the ends, fold the paper into triangles on top and bottom, crease, and fold up. Then pull the edge down and tape. Repeat on the other end.

Voila! A cromulently wrapped gift (you can see it done here). Some of the folding isn’t 100% necessary, but results in a neater-looking job. And you can employ double-sided tape to hide it, creating a seamless look, but this is also extra credit and not absolutely required.

If speed is more important than an exquisite final product, you can do some speed wrapping:

1. Measure your paper so it wraps all the way around your box with two inches extra.
2. Place the box on its narrow side, diagonally across the back of the paper.
3. Take the corner closest to you and fold it so it lines up with the edge of the box to your left, secure with tape.
4. Fold along the edge created and bring the flap of paper up flush with the box edge. Secure with tape.
5. Repeat on the other three sides.

These classic approaches require a lot of tape, which means you will likely run out of tape. Plus, all that tape can get maddening and messy, especially as you grow increasingly frantic as the clock winds down toward gifting deadlines. But you don’t actually need tape to wrap a gift:

1. Cut your paper so you have two-inch margins all around your box.
2. Turn the paper so it’s a diamond shape, place the box in the middle.
3. Fold the bottom point of the diamond up and tuck it under the box.
4. Fold in both sides and fold up along the top of the box.
5. Holding those ends in place (awkwardly with your wrist), fold the top down and over.
6. Tuck the point under the folded sides.

You can see it done here—no tape used at all!

Pro tip: Just as with any artistic endeavor, the key is in the finishing. Now that you have a perfectly wrapped gift, add some ribbon to really play up the fact that you’re better than everyone else—and for the final coup de grace, use custom labels. You can use a fancy label maker to create labels, grab some label templates for your printer, or just buy some custom gift tags.

Different materials

Having no tape is one thing, but what if you have no wrapping paper (or you’re concerned about the environmental impact)? You have plenty of options:

• Other papers. Newspaper, butcher paper, tissue paper, brown paper bags (like the kind you get at the grocery store) cut into sheets—the fundamental quality of wrapping paper is paper, after all. If you have leftover wallpaper from a renovation project, that can be used as well. Using paper without any design on it also affords the opportunity to add unique, custom doodling and art to each one.
• Containers. If your gift isn’t in a box, you don’t need to go buy a box and wrap it if you have an alternative container. Old (cleaned) jars, metal tins, or cans (paint cans, for example, if properly cleaned) can contain a gift. If you do need a small box, turning a cereal box inside-out can serve pretty well.
• Fabric. Fabric can be a terrific way to wrap a gift that feels both more upscale and more personal and craft-y. You can go full elegant and use Japanese furoshiki, or make your own fabric gift bags, turn old sweaters into gift bags, or even use old towels, pillowcases, and sheets to wrap up your gifts.
• Trash. If you don’t have any of the above materials, you can whip something up from the stuff you normally throw away. Toilet paper or paper towel rolls can be transformed into nifty gift boxes with a few cuts and folds—they work very well for loose jewelry that doesn’t have its own box. In a pinch, aluminum foil can make a glam wrapping paper. And empty (and cleaned) chip bags can be cut, turned inside out, and used as shiny wrapping paper in a pinch.

Different shapes

Of course, classic wrapping techniques—no matter the materials involved—work best when you have a nice square-ish shape to cover. What happens when you’re trying to wrap something that isn’t (and can’t be) in a box? You have a few choices here:

• Illusion. If you have some oddly shaped things, combine them and make them look like a totally different and hilariously inappropriate gift (toilets are a popular shape!).
• Literal. You could also just wrap it in a straightforward way that does nothing to hide what the gift is. This works best if the gift comes in several parts that can be wrapped individually and then placed together.
• Envelopes and bags. One of the easiest ways to wrap an oddly shaped gift is to place it in a gift bag. TikTok shows us that you can make your own gift envelope from wrapping paper (or any kind of paper, really) just by cutting an appropriate amount of paper and folding/taping it into shape.
  • Pro tip: Use a piece of cardboard on the bottom of your DIY gift bag/envelope to add some stability.

There are also some shape-specific approaches for gifts that aren’t boxes:

• Cylindrical. There are two simple ways to wrap a cylindrical object. Both start with cutting a piece of wrapping paper that will go all the way around the gift with an inch or so of overlap. One approach is to make a series of cuts to the top and bottom of your paper, then wrap the gift and tuck the tabs you’ve created in to create a neat top and bottom. Alternatively, cinch the paper at the top and bottom with a ribbon to get a “party favor” look.
• Bottles. These are kind of a sub-category of cylinders, so you can use a hybrid of the two approaches above: Cut tabs into the bottom of your paper to fold over into a nice base, but use the ribbon “party favor” approach at the top.
• Flat and round. For large, flat objects like a tennis racquet or guitar, trace their shape onto your paper, adding a healthy margin of three to four inches. Then cut the shape out twice and sandwich the gift between like you’re making a pie.
• Spherical. When wrapping a spherical gift, fabric is your easiest choice, as you can simply wrap the fabric around it and cinch the top with some ribbon. For a more “finished” look, use a variation on the envelope technique above that takes the dimensions of your gift into account, as seen here. The easiest choice? An appropriately sized gift bag of any kind.

Alternatives

For very large gifts like a bicycle or exercise equipment (or if you live in a world where commercials are real, an entire new car), it might not be worth it to wrap them at all—just slap a bow on there and keep them out of sight until it’s time for the gift exchange. In fact, if your gift-giving cohort is amenable, you can skip gift wrapping entirely and just put your gifts in a bag until it’s time to exchange.

If you need things wrapped but you don’t trust your ability to take simple measurements, make crisp seams, and apply tape without inviting ruin (you are my people), don’t forget that we live in a consumerist society and there are professional wrapping services out there you can avail yourself of. Many stores will happily wrap your purchases if you ask (sometimes for free), and there is probably a wrapping service in your area (or a mobile one that will come to you) if you Google for it (you can find a small directory of these services here).

Gift wrapping is also a side hustle for some folks, so it’s worth it to check places like TaskRabbit or Thumbtack for wrapping services in your area.