From Japan, an old twist on gift wrap
Joe Yonan
The Washington Post
Nov. 30, 2007 05:23 PM
I've had a thing for wrapping gifts as
long as I've had a thing for giving them.
Thankfully, my style has evolved. Where
once I spent hours cutting out bold figures
from magazine ads and pasting them on
brightly colored boxes, now I'm more likely
to spend hours embellishing simple brown
paper with tasteful stripes or dots, tying
it up with silk or raffia, and accenting
it with a metal or twig tag.
It took a recent trip to Japan to turn
me in a new direction. After the clerk
at a tradition-bound knife shop wrapped
up a package in a single piece of purple
rayon, rolling and tucking and expertly
fashioning a knot into a bow, I investigated
the Japanese art of furoshiki. And I found
that centuries after furoshiki first proliferated
as a way to carry goods when traveling,
the technique is enjoying a renaissance
in its homeland as an environmentally
friendly substitute for plastic shopping
bags, backpacks and paper gift wrapping.
Last year, in fact, the Japanese environment
minister commissioned a special furoshiki
pattern as a way to promote waste reduction.
It makes sense. Wrapping a gift in fabric
not only encourages reuse — depending
on size, the recipient can use the wrap
as a scarf or pocket square or pass it
along as another gift wrap — but
the technique also saves other wrapping
essentials such as ribbons and tape.
Better still, it's quick, easy and much
more forgiving than wrapping with paper.
The only requirements, really, are that
the fabric be beautiful and that it be
square.
With a few 19-inch cotton squares I found
on eBay and the help of "Gift Wrapping
With Textiles: Stylish Ideas From Japan"
by Chizuko Morita (Kodansha International,
2005), I was able to make quick and, frankly,
beautiful work of wrapping a CD and a
couple of books. One got a simple square-knot
bow, another a four-petal wrap, and the
third a flower effect created by tucking
the ends of fabric back into the center
of a knot. Fabric choice, naturally, affects
the result: silky fabrics produce something
soft and flowing, cotton material something
crisper.
Each took less than 10 minutes, and each
has a finished look that would take me
at least half an hour if working with
paper.
I'm still learning this craft, though,
and there have been some hurdles. Even
though the method is based on only three
simple knots, some of Morita's instructions
are tricky to follow (although they are
better than those I found on the Internet).
I have yet to master a wrap she calls
"All Dressed Up," an intricate
bow-tie treatment for a bottle of wine,
and so far my "Long-Tailed Pheasant"
looks more like "Two-Headed Pheasant."
Moreover, I initially bought only 19-inch
squares, so my fabric is just too small
to wrap anything but a little box.
After reading Morita's chart of sizes
and uses, I hit eBay again to order some
44-inch squares. Those will let me try
more designs with multiple knots, along
with the furoshiki ideas I'm most interested
in: the Basic Bottle Wrap and Two-Bottle
Wrap. The design possibilities of these
are lovely, including little handles built
into the top. They will forever replace
all those ugly wine bags I keep carting
to my dinner-party hosts, embarrassed
that the quality of the wine is cheapened
by the chintziness of the bag. Once I
get my new fabrics and master the wrap,
though, the opposite problem will become
true: I'll have to start buying better
bottles of wine.
