wrapping paper

My nephew had a birthday earlier this month, and in our quest for simplicity, I didn’t want to buy wrapping paper or even a gift bag. It seems silly to me to spend money on something that’s going to get torn up and thrown away. So what I did instead was found some stamps at Goodwill for 49 cents and bought an inkpad from the Dollar Tree

and stamped all over a piece of the brown shipping paper I had left over from making the kids’ human body diagrams.

To take the simplicity one step further, you could totally do this with a paper grocery bag if your gift is small enough. Then, once you have your stamps and ink, you could always have free wrapping paper (just buy a few groceries first ;)). Score!