We happened upon these pretty paper pinwheels made from our Market recycled wrapping paper and thought they’d be fun to share. Created by Etsy seller Elizabeth St., her shop features an assortment of lovely handmade paper wares. It’s always a treat seeing how paper crafters put our gift wrap to work. If you have a great project to share, be in touch!

{Photos by Elizabeth St.}

Jolie Colis is a local Syracuse company that takes after our own hearts. Proprietress Carol has a love for paper and a passion for well-wrapped gifts, and specializes in offering gift styling services that dazzle. This pretty package features our Veranda recycled gift wrap, made up with satin ribbons and tiny little sparkles and beads that play off the floral design. You can see more on the Jolie Colis blog. So lovely! Thanks for sharing, Carol!

Our good friends and proprietresses, Sarah and Erin of Haute Papier, recently planned a first birthday party for Erin’s daughter inspired by our colorful red and purple Picadilly collection. We love how it turned out! The colorful patterns of our eco gift wrap were crafted into garlands, cheerful bunting, cones to hold cake pops and used to wrap gifts, of course. It’s always fun to see how people put our gift wrap to use, but this party takes the cake! Happy birthday, little Etta!

{Photos by Haute Papier.}

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!

Working with incredible retailers across the country and internationally is, hands down, the best part about what we do at Smock. They keep us inspired and energized and looking forward to creating imaginative, sustainably printed letterpress for customers worldwide. One store in particular that continues to amaze us is Urbanic Paper Boutique and their fabulous blog Parcel Post, where owner Audrey Woollen routinely feature a glimpse into life at Urbanic and the great paper products they carry. We’re always delighted when Smock products pop up in their weekly Friday at the Shop feature and have found ourselves continually loving the great photos they’ve taken of our 100% post consumer recycled gift wrap.

All of our gift wraps are double-sided, printed with bright festive patterns that coordinate with many of our letterpress greeting cards and letterpress gift tags. Later this week, we’ll be featuring Urbanic in our Smock Store Spotlight feature so be sure to stop back for all the behind the scenes details of one of our favorite paper shops!

{Photos by Urbanic for Parcel Post.}

With the holidays swiftly approaching, we were recently contacted by two of our fabulous Smock retailers about contributing some Smock goodies for holiday events being hosted at their stores. Naturally, we couldn’t resist getting in on the holiday action. At Smock, we believe in giving back at the holidays and throughout the year so we were excited for the opportunity to help our stores out this holiday season.

We sent these little bundles, featuring a few of our letterpress holiday cards and letterpress gift tags, to our friends at Salutations in North Carolina where they were hosting a holiday open house at each of their stores in Charlotte and Chapel Hill. Guests to the event had to bring non-perishable food items to donate to the local food pantry in order to gain admittance to the event. We’re delighted to have been a part of such a fabulous event!

We also happily sent some of our double-sided 100% post consumer recycled gift wrap and letterpress gift tags to Broadway Paper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Broadway Paper’s holiday open house is being held this Saturday, November 14th – you can visit their website and the Broadway Paper blog for more details if you’re in Wisconsin and would like to attend.

What are you doing to get in the holiday spirit? We’d love to hear about the fabulous events you’re hosting or attending this holiday season!

Here at Smock, we absolutely love Stationery Trends a fabulous trade magazine dedicated to all things stationery and paper. This year we were thrilled to be featured in Stationery Trends several times, including a piece about our double-sided 100% post consumer recycled gift wrap in our Calliope design in the winter issue…

In May, with the National Stationery Show fast approaching and just in time for Smock’s first birthday, we were completely excited to see one of our letterpress birthday cards, our Happy Happy Birthday to You card, on the cover of the spring 2009 issue of Stationery Trends! Coincidentally, the magazine was also celebrating their first birthday and wanted to showcase a great birthday card on the cover. We’re sincerely honored that they chose one of ours! Inside that same issue, they also showcased a beautiful customization of one of our letterpress wedding invitation designs, Rhon, which we printed as a letterpress bat mitzvah invitation.

Thank you so much to the folks at Stationery Trends for a great publication and for continually supporting Smock!

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.