DIY Wall Art - Typo Paper Bag

Last updated on 29 August 2017

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DIY Wall Art Using a Typo Brown Paper Bag | From L&P to English Tea Blog

Here in New Zealand we have a store called Typo. It’s actually an Australian store, but they have a lot of branches around the country. It’s basically a stationery store, but it’s so super cute that I could quite easily furnish not just an office with the things they have, but an entire house. In fact, when I have my own house, that’s probably where I’m headed first. If not to buy things, then to get ideas.

I was in there the other day and bought a few things (you can see them here), and they put them in this great brown paper bag with neat newspaper-like images on side, and a deer on the other. I didn’t want to throw it away because it was such a neat bag, but I didn’t really know what to do with it. I wasn’t going to use it again and give it to someone, because it had ‘Typo’ on it, and that’s silly. And I didn’t want to paint or paste over it, so I had to think of something else. That’s when this happened. I’m super pleased with how it came out. Here’s what the bag looked like, both sides:

Obviously for this DIY wall art you’re going to need a paper bag. Obvious thing #2: I used a Typo bag. But of course, you can use whatever bag you have that has cool patterns or pictures on it. So many shops are using brown paper bags these days that I’m sure you can think of somewhere you could get a hold of one.

So, I chopped by paper bag carefully, trying to cut straight down the folded lines. After chopping I had two pieces: the newspaper-like square, and the deer head (cut slightly away from the edges).

Next I grabbed some washi tape and stuck it in strips to a normal piece of paper, and then stuck the deer to the washi tape. Then I cut around the deer again, leaving space so you could see the tape. And finally I stuck to the deer to the newspaper-like section. Super easy, but I think it looks quite nifty.

There are several ways you could display something like this. You could simply blue-tack it to the wall, pin it to a cork board, put it in a frame, even use funky magnets and put it on your fridge. Or you could do what I did and use washi tape. I ended up using just two small pieces of washi tape, one in the top left hand corner, the other in the right hand bottom corner, but there are a few ways you could use washi tape to display it.

So there we have it! A fun DIY to recycle your old brown paper shopping bags. If you don’t have anywhere that does cool ones like Typo, why not create your own images, and stick them together? The options are endless!