I love using Christmas as a time to get crafting and creative with the kids and this DIY gift wrap is no exception. We have designed wrapping paper with potato print penguins on it.    I love it when I have craft ideas that can be used to share the love over the festive season and I know that relatives will be delighted with this DIY gift wrap that combines potato prints with fingerprints! So cute.

How to make Potato Print Penguins DIY gift wrap

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Materials:

• Brown paper
• Paper Plates or regular plates
• Potatoes
• Knife
• Black and White tempura paint
• Orange acrylic paint
• Paint brush
• Googley eyes or wiggly eyes

Instructions:

Printing with potatoes is an inexpensive and fun way to mark make with kids and if you cut a handhold in your potatoes it makes it much easier for toddlers and preschoolers little hands.  I am going to admit that I have a stash of paper plates and I use these as palates instead of washing regular plates!  

First up pick your potatoes.  You need a large potato for the body of the penguin and then a smaller one for the penguin’s tummy.

Start by laying your brown paper or any other large roll of paper you have across the table.  I made sure I cut two potatoes as I didn’t want the boys fighting and gave them one each.  Then comes the fun part of stamping the potatoes in the black paint and onto the paper randomly. You could also use a paintbrush to coat the potato stamps.

We used tempura (water-based) paint for this, but you could use acrylic paint.  Then allow the black penguin bodies to dry.

Once the black paint has dried, you then move on to adding the white belly, ideally on top of the black.  Don’t be too precious with your kids about this.  These potato print penguins look adorable even if it is a little rustic!

Then you can have a cup of tea whilst the white paint dries, before moving on to adding the googly eyes. We are big fans of wiggle eyes in The Mad House.

We used googly eyes with peel-off backs for this project and the boys stuck them on each penguin, but don’t worry you could just add a dab of white paint if you don’t have any.  We used orange paint for our penguin’s beak and feet and if your kids want too they could fingerprint the feet on.

Then we set aside our wrapping paper overnight to allow it to dry before using it.

I was worried that the eyes might come off when we wrapped our present, but they didn’t.

We wanted to make our wrapping as magical as the gift inside, so we decided to do one design on one side and something else on the other.  Yes, we are really into DIY gift wrap here and our next job is to make penguin cards the same way just using white card to print on!

DIY Gift Wrap – Ribbon Tree

The boys decided that they wanted to make a BIG version of our favourite simple ribbon Christmas cards.  So I dig out all of the festive ribbons and embellishments they started designing using Sellotape double-sided tape.

They had so much fun cutting the ribbon and tape to the size they wanted, designing their Christmas tree. If you don’t have any ribbon then you also use fabric as decoration.

Then they embellished the rest of that side of the wrapping paper with decorative buttons and stickers and a pug with antlers! They even used white clay stars that we made and painted them silver and gold.

We had so much fun with these gift wrapping ideas that I will be sharing with you the other wrapping paper that people have made as soon as I can too.

Why not take a look at our other DIY Gift Wrap:

• Gold star wrapping paper
• Colourful printed wrapping paper 
• Footprint wrapping paper

You could also use your potato cut penguins to decorate Christmas cards or gift tags.