Put an old twist on gift wrap

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 colored boxes, now I'm more likely to spend hours embellishing simple brown paper with dots, tying it up with raffia and accenting it with a 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 as an environmentally friendly substitute for plastic shopping bags, backpacks and paper gift wrapping.

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 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 and the help of "Gift Wrapping With Textiles: Stylish Ideas From Japan" by Chizuko Morita (Kodansha International, 2005), I was able to make quick, 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. 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.