Recycled Magazine Basket

2 Materials
30 Minutes
Easy
I recently got given a huge pile of old magazines, which when added to the stack I already had at home, made me realise that we really needed to come up with some crafty ideas to use them up! There are a few different ways you can make baskets out of recycled magazines, this basket weave design is probably the simplest and quickest, and I love the checkered pattern which it creates.
We started by cutting strips from our magazines. We chose to use a couple of the glossier ones, which had thicker pages than some of the others, for our project, thinking it would make a sturdier basket when it was finished. Our strips were about 5cms in width - you are going to fold them twice, so your weave will end up a quarter of whatever you start with.
For each strip we..
Folded it in half to make a crease then unfolded it again. We then folded each side to the crease, and then folded the whole strip in half along the original crease, resulting in strips just over 1cm in width, made up of 4 layers. Doing it this way means that if your edges are uneven when you started, they will not show as they are now tucked inside.
Despite making really sharp creases (you can see us using a knife to do this above), our strips still tried to open up (see 2nd photo above), so we decided to run a little glue along the inside of each one, to hold them firm, and left them to dry.
You can now start weaving. We used a piece of card as a guide to show us were to start the weave as you need to leave some length for the sides, and used a clipboard to hold all our strips firmly while we got started.
We also used a few dabs of glue as we went along to hold everything in place.
Once the base had dried, we removed it from the clipboard, and bent the remaining strips up to form the sides. We then continued to weave the sides.
This time we used little pieces of double sided sticky tape to hold everything in place (not on them all, just the odd one).
This time we used little pieces of double sided sticky tape to hold everything in place (not on them all, just the odd one). I would say that this isn't essential, but it does make it easier - particularly for a child.
When we got to the top, we bent the outer ends in, and secured and cut the inner ends off, to finish. As you can see from the photo, the sides of our basket is 3 strips high. If we had made it an even number of strips we would have been able to finish off by tucking our ends into the weave, which would have resulted in a neater finish - so that's what we will do next time!
Our resulting basket is really cute, and it's lovely to finally use up something that normally would end up in the recycling. You could fill these baskets with home-made goodies, and use them as gifts. We also used up some of our magazines in our  Easter Egg Decoupage, which is another really fun craft to do with kids
Suggested materials:
  • Magazine Pages   (Home)
  • Scissors, glue and Clipboard   (Home)
Craft Invaders
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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Frequently asked questions
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  3 questions
  • Pat Pat on Mar 11, 2017
    What are the dimensions of the finished box? I definitely want to try it!
  • Vicky Corey Vicky Corey on May 11, 2018

    This is really neat! Do you have a video of this? I really need a visual to do it. Thanks.

  • Dale Barefoot Dale Barefoot on Jul 23, 2018

    Couldn’t you glue strips together to make a larger basket?

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  • Caseyem11 Caseyem11 on May 03, 2017

    Sunday comics come in color and would make a great basket. U have to deal with diluted white glue or modgepodge to keep the ink rom coming off.

  • Crystal Ward Crystal Ward on Sep 21, 2018

    I learned how to do this in an odd place but i made purses wallets and boxes this way. Very cool

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