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Gift Wrap

You can use a tile you’ve designed yourself to make personalised wrapping paper for a small gift—one small enough to be wrapped in a sheet of A4 paper. You may have some light-weight or coloured paper that would be ideal for this, but even on ordinary white paper it can be rather nice.

Making the Tile

This is much easier than making a background for stationery. You don’t have to do the very careful cutting out of the final tile. I won’t repeat the instructions from Making Seamless Tiles. I’m assuming you’ve been through those.

1. Open Paint and make an aqua square about 150x150.The background colour will be replaced with white at the end—it saves ink. The other colours you use will stay the same; there’s no embossing or lightening involved this time.
2. Use a fancy font in a largish size to write the person’s name, your own name, or a greeting.
3. Click the rectangular selection tool, click Image on the menu bar and choose Stretch and Skew.
4. Ignore the top half of the box. In the Skew part, write 30 in the Vertical slot. Leave the other at 0.
5. Turn the tile inside out as you did when making seamless tiles.
6. Add some decorations in bright colours to the center.
7. Flood the background square with white.
8. Use the colour rubber (aqua on left button, white on right button, drag with right button) to erase bits of background from inside letters or decorations.
9. Click on the rectangular selection tool, hold the shift key and make a selection around your tile. Make the selection somewhat bigger than the original.
10. While the selection is active, click Edit and choose Copy.
11. Open Irfan View and click Edit > Paste.
12. Click File > Save and save the picture as a gif.

That’s the tile finished.

Making the Wrapping

1. Drag the tile that you just made into your stationery folder. If you haven’t made a shortcut, remember it’s C:/Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Stationery.
2. Open Outlook Express.
3. Click the down arrow beside New Mail.
4. Click Select Stationery.
5. Click Create New.
6. Click Next.
7. In the Stationery Setup Wizard box, click Browse.
8. Scroll along and find the gif you just put into the stationery box. Double click it, or click it once and click Open.
9. Back in the Stationery Setup Wizard box, click where it says Do Not Tile and choose Entire Page.
10. Click Next through the Font and Margin boxes. Nothing there matters. In the Complete box, write Gift Wrap—or anything you fancy—in the name slot.
11. Click Finish.
12. Click OK.
13. Close the new email that opens automatically.
14. Close Outlook Express.

That’s the wrapping finished. Now to printing.

Printing the Wrapping

To print the wrapping, you’ll have to turn on Print background colors and images. After you’ve printed the wrapping, be sure to turn it off again.

OK. Here are the easy steps.

• If you have some, put some coloured paper into your printer.
• Open your stationery folder.
• Find the file you just made—probably Gift Wrap.htm.
• Double click to open it in Internet Explorer. (I’m assuming that IE is your default browser. If it isn’t, Shift+Right Click and choose Open with. Make sure that little “Always use” box is not checked, though.)
• Click File > Print Preview.
• If you like what you see, click Print.
• Close Print Preview, go back to Internet Options and take the tick out of the Print background colors and images box. Click OK.
• Wrap your present.

If the margins are too wide, go into File > Page Setup and change them. Write down what they are before you do this, though.

Once you’ve printed you’ll need to take the scissors and trim away a tiny bit of printing from the top and bottom of the page. It is possible to avoid the black printing on top and bottom of the page, but it’s risky. I’ll tell you how after you’ve read through the section below. IE doesn’t have a Restore Defaults button in the Page Setup box and you’d have to type everything back just as it was.

Warning! There’s an option here to change the settings in Internet Explorer Page Setup. If you want to use that option, please record the original settings before you do anything else in that box.

Restoring IE Page Setup

1. In Internet Explorer, click the File menu. Click on Page Setup.
2. Hold down the Alt key.
3. Tap the Print Screen key.
4. Open Irfan View or Paint.
5. Click Edit and choose Paste.
6. Click Save and call the picture Default Page Settings in IE.
7. Take careful note of where you have saved it—or save it to the desktop.
8. Print the picture.

You could just write down everything you see in the Page Setup box, but it’s so easy to miss one thing or make a tiny mistake.

To eliminate the black headers at top and bottom, you simply clear the header and footer boxes in Page Setup.

After you’ve printed, be sure to go back to the Page Setup box and type the header and footer in exactly as they were. Any tiny mistake, like a missed space, could really mess up your headers and footers permanently. I recommend the scissors!

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