Bubble Wrap Craft Ideas

The most common use for bubble wrap rolls is to protect items that are going to be sent in the mail, or boxed up when you move house.  However, once those items reach their destination, the bubble wrap isn’t useless.

Unless you’re a professional eBay seller, you probably don’t send enough items in the mail to use up the bubble wrap that comes into your house – so why not save up all those bits of bubble wrap, and use them in creative projects?

Here’s a few crafty ideas to get you started:

1. Halloween Costumes: Shape a couple of old coat hangers to make wings (or horns), wrap a layer of bubble wrap over them, and then paint them to add the finishing touch.
2. Festive Decorations: If you’re lucky enough to get the bubble wrap with the big bubbles, paint them white, and cut them out to make “snow” to decorate your nativity scene.  You can also wrap old tennis balls in bubble wrap to make a cute snowman.
3. Window art: Mix up some white craft glue and food colouring to create tinted glue, and use it to stick scraps of coloured tissue paper to the bubble wrap.  Hang the art in front of your window and enjoy the effects.
4. Bubble candles:  Lay out a sheet of bubble wrap (flat side down), and pour melted candle wax over it.  Roll up the wax, adding a wick to the centre, and peel the bubble wrap away.  You should be left with a nice, bumpy looking candle.
5. Bubbly Dalek: If you’re a fan of Dr Who, why not pretend you’re on Blue Peter, and make a Dalek using toilet roll tubes, pipe cleaners, and bubble wrap?

Most of these craft ideas can be done with just the scraps of bubble wrap you accumulate over a year of mail-order shopping.  If you’re a devoted arts-and-crafts fan, or love making costumes for festivals, fancy dress parties, and conventions, then you might need to buy a few bubble wrap rolls to make sure that you have enough – but that’s a whole different league of crafting!  Before you rush out to buy extra bubble wrap, why not check Freecycle to see if anyone in your local area has some that they’re looking to get rid of.

If you run a mail order shop, please spare a thought for your customers.  A lot of the packaging used by mail order companies is difficult to recycle.  Bubble wrap rolls are a little more friendly than, say, Styrofoam, but from a conservation point of view the best option is to use as little packaging as possible.  If a product can be safely shipped in a small box with just a little padding, that’s a much better choice than using a huge box and even more padding.  It may be annoying to have to keep a stock of a few different sizes of box, but you’ll save money on shipping, and your customers will appreciate your concern for the environment.