Upcycled Magazine Basket

6 Materials
Easy
There are so many crafts that you can make to celebrate Earth Day. It's a great time to look around your home and see what you've collected to repurpose into something new. I keep a decorative container filled with magazines in my bedroom. I love looking at them over and over to get inspiration and sometimes use in recycle/upcycle projects. I remember seeing a basket made of wrapped magazine strips shaped into open squares that looked so different and unique. I filed that image away intending one day to create something like it. It has taken awhile to finally put the basket together. I actually started it last year, got discouraged and put it away. Looking for something to make for Earth Day, I hauled it out to finish it. Now it's perfect for Earth Day!
Begin by making tubes from magazine pages that will be shaped into squares. I cut out only green (for grass) and blue (for sky) pattern pages from home and garden magazines. Fold the pages in half lengthwise, and then fold in half again. Cut along the folds into four even strips. Take a skewer stick and place it on the corner edge of the page at an angle. Take the end tip over the skewer and start rolling the paper until you get near the end.
Add white glue to the triangular edge and roll to the end. Flatten the finished tubes.
Next, take a small square container (salt shaker) and wrap a tube around it a few times. Seal end with hot glue and remove from container.
Make a total of 54 squares.
To assemble the basket, connect the squares in groups of three for each side. Apply hot glue along the connecting edges and press together. Then cut smaller strips of rods and wrap around the connecting sides and hot glue in place. For the shorter two sides, three rows of three squares were glued together and wrapped. For the longer sides and bottom, four rows of three squares are glued together, and wrapped. All corners were connected in the same manner to form the basket. Cardboard was measured slightly smaller than the bottom of the baske, mod podge on both sides with magazine paper, and inserted inside the basket to prevent contents from falling out.
And finally, five tubes were woven together to make the handle. Find the full tutorial on how to weave here. The ends of the handle were wrapped around the center square, hot glued together and secured with a piece of tube and hot glue. The basket can be sealed with mod podge or clear gorilla wood glue.
This handcrafted upcycled magazine basket is perfect for showing off a huge array of items, one of which are beautiful spring flowers.
Suggested materials:
  • Magazine pages
  • Small square container
  • White glue &hot glue
See all materials
Gail@Purple Hues and Me
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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  • Susan Langlois Susan Langlois on Apr 25, 2016
    Approximately how long did it actually take to make this? Very cute.
  • Kathy Haines Cramer Kathy Haines Cramer on Apr 25, 2016
    You say to cut the magazine into 4 even pieces, but your photo does rolling a whole page?
  • Sue Sanders Sue Sanders on Apr 27, 2016
    Since you are working with whole pages I cant figure out what you did with the page you cut into strips. Clearly if you had strips you couldn't start rolling at corners.
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