I have a habit of saving magazines and it’s borderline hoarding. I always think I can use the pages for an infinite number of art projects. From making vision boards, to modge podging just about anything, to paper weaving. The latter I just discovered and thought, why not.

I had a home staging project a few months ago and I needed art. I already had 2 black frames that I’d gotten from Ikea probably 2 years ago and I hadn’t used them yet. The only thing I had to buy was a thin white poster board from Walmart. So a project was born.

Here are just some of my magazines that I have in my stash. Fashion magazines are usually the best if you want to have a range of colors.

The color scheme of the staging project had a lot of neutrals with pops of blues, so I took a bunch of pages from the magazine with all of these colors in it. I also used white pages with script for a little contrast.

Then I went to town cutting them into one inch strips of different sizes and was left with a bunch of strips ranging from ½” – 2”.

To keep the pieces from sliding all over the place, I glued down the tops of the strips vertically with a glue stick. I didn’t have a pattern in mind, I just kind of intuitively picked out long and short pieces that I thought looked good together.

Now I was ready for the horizontal strips. I did the same thing in terms of colors and wove the pieces in and out. Sometimes the pieces needed to be cut and sometimes I needed to add another piece because it was too short. When that happened, I hid the seam behind one of the vertical pieces. I thought it would go fast, but this was more tedious than I thought it would be. I had to make sure there was enough white space around the art to look balanced.

Once I was sure I liked what I had done, I put them in the frames. Here is what a finished picture looked like as well as a picture of one of them in the staged house. 

I thought this project was relatively easy and it was a good use of my magazines although I could do projects with magazines for the rest of my life and probably still not make a dent.

Let me know in the comments what you think and if you have any ideas for using magazines.