Boots Multipack Gift Wrap Pack in Red & Gold > Reviews (1)

This review was written and published on dooyoo at the beginning of the month.

I know that some people will only just be thinking about Christmas. Some people will just be starting their Christmas shopping, some of you may be the kind of people who refuse to think about Christmas until the beginning of December, or even worse the kind who does their Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve. I'm not one of those people. I started my Christmas shopping months ago and have now finished most of it. I've even wrapped the presents.

I'm notoriously bad at wrapping presents. There was one year when I couldn't find any cellotape so I used staples. Another year the presents unwrapped themselves because the cellotape had somehow lost it's stickyness. I volunteered to wrap presents for a children's charity one Christmas and ended up feeling guilty that some disadvantaged children would end up with presents that looked like they had been wrapped by a two year old. This year I was determined that my presents would look wonderful. Clearly it is the poor quality wrapping paper and cellotape (or lack of cellotape) that is to blame for my badly wrapped presents.

I found the Boots Red and Gold wrapping pack in Boots (surprise!) for £5. There were a number of different packs but I decided to go for this one because I thought it looked the most festive. Red and Gold really are for me the colours of Christmas and I thought it would be nice to wrap my presents in these colours. The pack contains four different rolls of wrapping paper; one plain gold, one plain red, one patterned red and one patterned gold. In addition to this there's some red ribbon, gold ribbon and bows in red and gold.

I found the wrapping paper to be strong and of a high quality. I think that strength is important in wrapping paper because I know from experience that if you don't have strong paper it will often rip before you've even given the present to the person it's intended for. There's no chance of that happening with this paper. I found that because of the strength of the paper it was easier to wrap the presents. Sometimes if paper is too thin it's difficult to wrap it around the present in a neat way. With this I found that the paper wrapped around easily and was strong enough for to bend it into different shapes (such as that of a Christmas cracker) and still look nice and not as though it's second hand paper. All four different rolls were equally as strong and I really liked having the variety of paper rather than just wrapping all of my presents in the same paper.

The ribbon provided with this set was pretty good. I was able to curl the ribbon pretty easily although I did find that sometimes when I curled the ribbon it made it lose some of it's shine. I loved having two different colours of ribbon, it allowed me some creativity. My only complaint is that the amount of ribbon was not proportional to the amount of wrapping paper. I don't think I over used the ribbon, some presents I didn't have any ribbon on, other presents I only had a little bit of ribbon on and a few presents I had it going right around the present.

I ran out of ribbon fairly quickly and there wasn't enough to use on all of my presents. I encountered similar problems with the ribbons. There just weren't enough of them. There's so much wrapping paper, four rolls and you just aren't given enough accessories to go with this amount of paper. I ended up buying an additional accessory pack so that all of my presents could be pretty. I found that the bows weren't very durable. I put a present with a bow on in a gift bag and when I got it out (it hadn't had anything on top of it) the bow had come undone. If you put these bows on your presents you need to be careful with them, unless you don't mind them unravelling. The other problem that I encountered with the bows is that it can be difficult to pull the paper off of the sticky bit on the back and the staple in the bow sometimes catches on the paper so that you're left with some of the paper left on the plastic and it's difficult to get it off without pulling out the staple and ruining the bow. However, the bow does stick very nicely and not a single bow has fallen off.

Overall I'm happy with this set. The paper is good quality and the ribbon curls nicely. The bows do let the set down slightly and the accessories provided aren't proportional to the amount of paper you're given so you may need to buy more. I would love to say that all of my presents look wonderful, like they were professionally wrapped but that would be a lie. They look considerably better than any present I've ever wrapped before and that's good enough for me! Having a nice wrapping set does not make up for personal incompetence but it helps.

(The specific criteria for this item is irrelevant!)