New England portrait and wedding photographer Brea McDonald recently planned a baby shower for her good friend, Amber. Hosted at The Blue Elephant in Saco, Maine, she pulled together a beautiful garden-inspired event using her collection of vintage table linens and a bunch of sweet DIY touches. The coolest part? The sweet DIY paper pinwheels she crafted using Smock gift wrap that she purchased at Gus & Ruby Letterpress, one of our beloved Smock dealers. We love this idea! Our gift wraps all feature colorful double-sided patterns printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper. It’s always a treat for us to see the unique ways people put our recycled wrapping paper to work, but these paper pinwheels are definitely one of our favorites!

To read more about this pretty baby shower, visit Brea’s blog.

{Photos by Brea McDonald.}

For those of you still finishing up last minute shopping, we wanted to take a moment to share some of our favorite gift giving ideas this holiday season. I polled the Smock team for their suggestions for great presents and honestly wish I could be the recipient of all of these incredible gifts! These ideas are sure to please.

Smock’s creative director and designer, Amy Graham Stigler, is in love with upcycled mittens made from old sweaters. (You can visit Simple Up for easy to follow patterns for making your own hat and mittens.)

Smock co-owner Debbie Urbanski recommends Cannellini heirloom beans – these beans are so delicious you’ll never go back to grocery store beans again. In fact, they are so popular, Rancho Gordo was sold out of them for nearly a year!

My personal favorite gift to give this holiday season is a great hand-poured soy candle (or two) from Linnea’s Lights. Not only are the fragrances amazing, but the packaging is simply divine.

Our client coordinator, Lindsy, is a big fan of this pretty embroidered clutch from Free People. It’s a lovely gift for any lady in your life like a sister or a special girlfriend.

Beth Ann, one of our in-house graphic designers, is gifting this great recipe basket from Longaberger this year. This handcrafted basket is the perfect gift for the cooking or baking enthusiast in your life.

This idea is quite near and dear to our hearts – our office manager, Carrie, took old salvaged books and created cool boxes by hollowing them out and lining them in scraps of our eco gift wrap. She’s filling each with fun little goodies for her family and friends.

When thinking up fun ways to use our eco gift wrap this holiday season, we dug deep into our craft drawers at home to find cute bows, ribbon and tulle. We used the wrap to stuff gift bags, crafted it into ribbon and curly bows and played with the double-sided patterns to create pretty stacks of presents all tied up with cute embellishments. At Smock, we’re the type of folks who adore a pretty package anytime of the year, but it’s especially fun at the holidays to gussy up packages for giving to loved ones. All of our gift wraps feature double-sided patterns printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper and come in over-sized sheets that are 24″ x 36″ – each roll comes with two sheets.

Smock’s Market wrap topped with a big yellow bow.

Smock’s pretty pink Plume wrap and Chiffon wrap tied up in a cute stack with iridescent ribbon.

Smock’s Liony blue and green gift wrap paired with salvaged fabric ribbon we had lying around from an old craft project.

Smock’s Julep gift wrap with a tuft of bright blue tulle on top.

This package is all wrapped up in pretty recycled kraft paper and features Smock’s Liony gift wrap as both ribbon and curly bow.

For those gifts better off rolled, we used our Savoy gift wrap to form a pretty patterned tube and then finished it off with white tulle.

No time to wrap? Here we used our Savoy and Ceylon gift wraps as stuffing for gift bags.

Smock’s Tissot gift wrap tied up with pretty purple and lavender ribbons in a basket weave pattern.

Our philosophy at Smock is that gifts don’t have to be lavish to be extraordinary. Even the simplest of gifts can leave a lasting impression when you get creative with great gift wrap and the perfect little letterpress card or gift tag. Still on the hunt for great gift ideas? We’ll be rounding up a few of our favorites next week for those of you who – like us – still have a long list of gifts to buy. Don’t miss it!

We were clicking around Etsy this morning, and happened upon this incredible handmade notebook and instantly fell in love. And, really, how would we not love it? Made by Etsy seller RedOtter, this notebook features Smock’s double-sided 100% post consumer recycled gift wrap and it’s absolutely beautiful! Thanks so much to RedOtter for choosing Smock paper for one of your lovely journals and for making us smile today!

{Photos by RedOtter}

This upcoming week at the National Stationery Show, visitors to Smock’s booth {2741} will have the opportunity to check out all of the exciting new additions to our Smock Everyday collection. New designs include 9 fresh additions to our gift wrap collection, all fun double-sided patterns environmentally printed on 100% post-consumer paper as well as numerous new letterpress greeting cards and letterpress note cards, printed on beautiful bamboo paper and paired with hand-lined bamboo envelopes. Thinking about the holidays already? You’re in luck, because so are we! By popular demand, Smock will introduce several new holiday greeting cards, gift tags and gift wraps at the stationery show so you can take care of all your holiday gift-giving needs in stylish eco-friendly fashion. All of our new designs will be available for sale on our website by the end of May and at select retailers nationwide.