Decorative Gift Wrapping, AKA Thesis Avoidance

No... we still haven't managed to get out all the Christmas presents. We're horrible.

Anyway, now that that's established, I wanted to show everyone my latest adventure in gift wrapping. I've been getting more adventurous about wrapping gifts which translates to: sometimes I really really want to waste some time. This weekend I needed to wrap up a big flat gift for a friend of ours. Initially I used the silver wrapping paper with... uhm... extra silver dots. The thing about big flat boxes, is that when you wrap them, even if you're really good at getting a tight wrap (which I'm not) they end up looking kind of sad and lame. It's the sagging in the middle. So I decided to add a couple of purple stripes from pre-used wrapping paper that I hadn't bothered to throw out yet.

Since the paper was kind of wrinkled I wrinkled it some more, so it would look intentional instead of just rude. Then I folded over the edges of the stripe to make them smooth and pushed each end under the already folded up silver paper.

It still looked lame.

I decided to put a kind of woven pattern across the box with the remaining purple paper. I ripped the paper into eight strips slightly shorter than the width of the package. I started out with seven but with what I ended up doing it made the package look asymmetrical (in a not good way) so I went with eight.

When I had them all torn and wrinkled, I twisted each piece lengthwise, and wove them under alternating sides of the two long stripes. I taped the ends of the stripes down around them to hold them in place and then taped down the loose end on the other stripe. The effect was nothing at all like a basket weave, more like an extended tic-tac-toe board, but it did fill the space much more effectively than the two lone stripes. It ended up looking kind of cool, I thought... in a this gift has tentacles and wants nothing more than to eat you kind of way.
Anyway, using these creative avoidance techniques I was able to waste nearly a half hour of time that could have been spent toiling away on my novel. With some work, you too could waste lots of time constructing something that one of your friends will almost immediately tear into shreds. Good luck!