Review: Jane Means' Gift Wrapping Workshop

On the first day of August, I had the privilege to attend Jane Means' Gift Wrapping Workshop. I got to relearn some of the skills I left behind for many years.

I no bluff. I was an excellent gift wrapper. I loved dong it and I could wrap a present beautifully with minimum 3 pieces of scotch tapes, just to seal the edges of the wrapping paper over the gift. Before I learnt about the use of double sided tapes, I could hide those scotch tapes if I wanted to(you probably know how). At one time, I was obsessed with fancy gift wrapping papers and I collected lots of them. Who doesn't like pretty things? I made good use of them for embellishing a bookmark or a card, or gift wrapping. I was good with pleating wrapping technique after seen it in a mall's gift-wrapping service corner. For many years, I have books' and dictionary's covers protected by beautiful wrapping papers. These days, I do more of impressing my daughter by recycling a page of Kikki K's catalogue into an envelop, neatly.

But I am not good with ribbon tying. Terrible, terrible, terrible. If you see one bow perfectly tied by me, it must be my lucky day!

So usually my gifts were without ribbon and bow.

Jane is an author and TV presenter. She has wrapped for luxury brands for over 15 years and she is amazingly versatile with all sorts of gift wrapping materials. I like how friendly and easy of her ideas of embellishment to enhance a humble gift, for example:- measurement taking was not necessary for making a tissue pompom; an envelop made from a remnant (wrapped) paper without measurement (picture right above) is doable. She is the queen of agaration!

As a gift wrapping guru, she gave very clear instruction in completing a task. She made gift wrapping tricks, inspiration and ideas very simple to understand and hands-on. I was thrilled to learn first-hand demonstration of tying a perfect bow, as well as two simple and effective ways of tailored ribbon bows. Apparently, all i need is to practice more;).

The three and a half hours workshop was therapeutic- to gently fold the colourful tissue papers, to roll a wired ribbon into a bow or twist it into a rose. Jane also taught us how to transform a cylinder shape into creative masterpiece and how to make ric rac flower. She blew my mind by showing us how to wrap a gift without any help from adhesive tape, and still look elegantly presented (refer to the red packs of the above left picture)! I also observed that she was superb in cutting the tissue paper quick and perfectly straight-lined! She has a pair of magic hands.

Picture left: A group photo at the end of the workshop;
Picture right above: Jane Means and us: Dominique, me, Janice and Serene (L to R).

If you are keen, future courses are planned for Spring 2016 in Singapore with limited early bird offer so to make sure you don't miss it, do join Jane Means' mailing list by emailing them at info@janemeans.co.uk.

In the meantime, get more inspirations through her Pinterest, or follow her twitter @janemeans, check out her blog for more tips and ideas! You can also take a peek into her book;).

Disclaimer: I was invited to attend the lessons in exchange of this review. All opinion are 100% mine.