Dear Friends of mine,
I’ll show you how dear you are to my heart and I’ll take you on a journey to look after Mother Earth if you want to come with me.
Let me tell you what happened to me!
My oldest asked me to wrap all Christmas presents as a present for once – I never did for environmental reasons, but she said it is a lot of fun to unwrap stuff and I changed my ways for her. It took me a better part of a fifty bucks and seven hours (!!!) to wrap everything. It made her very happy though the amount of rubbish we created scared me to bits.
Then on facebook I saw a video about the art of wrapping in fabric, originally from the Japanese culture and I got all excited. I was planning to buy cheap and pretty printed fabric, cut it up into squares then… the problems started to emerge when I considered finishing the edges, variety issues and so on. I also hated the idea of using new fabric but recycling would have been too resource-demanding. I thought of this as an idea for an environmentally friendly business then I decided it wasn’t feasible.
This is when I started re-reading the much loved, magical, revealing if not authentic novel of the Memoirs of a Geisha, where people kept of wrapping up presents in “pieces of silk”. I realised we do have pieces of silk here and now in New Zealand, easily available and cheap, only they are in the form of the despised and ridiculed “silkette” garish colored vintage square scarves nobody wants any more.
So now, having visited half a dozen op-shops in the past weeks, having spent less than I did at Christmas time, owning at least two dozen silk and silkette squares of various sizes, colors, patterns and finished edges, having handwashed them with a sanitiser and essential oil mixture, dried in the ocean breeze and summer sunshine, I am ready to dip into the japanese art of wrapping presents.
So, dear friends of mine, expect your presents from now on wrapped in a square of silk, unique and especially selected for you. It may be your next scarf, or your wrapping for the present you’ll give next time. Hang on to it (reuse and recycle), as this is part of our journey to look after each other and Mother Earth.