Old Magazine Kitchen Accents

If you subscribe to a couple of magazines a month you can end up with a bunch of them at the end of a year. There are many things a person can make from a magazine and some of them are quite nice. In fact, you can make the cutest kitchen set including a bowl, a trivet, and a set of coasters, and use up some of those useless magazines. The kitchen accent set takes a bit of time but, if you have the magazines already, it's virtually free.

Start making a coaster by ripping a single page from a magazine. Fold the page in half, lengthways, then fold it in half again. Continue folding it in half until you have a strip that is about a half-inch wide (the amount of times you fold it will depend on the size of magazine you're using). Make many strips before getting started on the coasters, trivet, and bowl.

Begin rolling the first strip, from one end to the other, so that you have a flat and tight circle. When you get to the end of that piece, connect another. To do that, slide the fold of the new piece into the open end of the first piece. Or, just tape them to each other. Continue adding more, and rolling the strips, so that the circle becomes the size you want for a coaster. Use a tiny piece of double-sided tape, or quick-dry glue, to secure the end. Then, coat the top of the coaster (the side with the folded edges of the strips) with decoupage adhesive, or a clear, waterproof glue.

To make a trivet, follow the instructions for a coaster, but make it much larger. To make a bowl, curl strips of paper as you do with the coaster or trivet, and make the circle as large as you want for the bottom of the bowl. Then, when you're ready to make the sides, wrap the next paper around the circle, but this time, come up about an eighth of an inch. Wrap it all the way around (adding more strips where needed), then take the next wrap up an eighth of an inch. Continue wrapping, taking each wrap up an eighth of an inch, until the bowl is as tall as you want. When creating the sides of the bowl use glue that dries in seconds.

As you're making the bowl, make the bottom, then coat it with glue, as instructed for the coaster. Do so before creating the sides. Then, as you make the sides, glue each strip in place as you wrap it. To finish the bowl, just glue down the end.

The magazine bowl can hold fruits, odds and ends, a silk plant, a real flower in a container, and any number of other things. The set, as a whole, is colorful, and gorgeous in the kitchen as well as other rooms of the house.