Simple & Fun Recycled Magazine Crafts for the Family

As a family, we love to come up with great ways to use items in more than one way. We just don’t like wasting things and throwing perfectly good things away, but honestly, with my packrat nature, I either get creative and recycle them or I make myself give it away.

So we use glue and sand to make little bricks to play with and build pyramids for our Egypt studies here and here, we use gift wrapping paper to line our table when we make crafts, we melt broken crayons to make crafts or bigger crayons and the list goes on.

This time, we recycled magazines! We made awesome jewelry out of the simple materials below. I had a stack of really old National Geographic Kids magazines, extra glue sticks, unused cake pop sticks, thread and large buttons, so we came up with a plan.

Since we have been studying Egypt lately, we wanted to make some jewelry, weave baskets and other fun crafts using materials we already own. So here it is. 😉 This is a tutorial on one of the crafts we made so you can see how easy it is to make and how fun it is to wear. And most importantly, how we didn’t spend a dime!

Here are three books we read about recycling:

First, we collected these things around the house:

kid-friendly magazines (to not have to scan and sort for inappropriate images)

glue sticks

cake pop sticks (you can use straws or even a smooth and thinnish stick)

scissors

ruler

permanent marker

needle and thread

a large button for each necklace that will be made

I used a ruler and permanent marker to mark thin and narrow (acute) triangles on a magazine page. My oldest cut them up super fast so we could get started on our fun recycling project.

Steps:

Take one triangle and cover one side of it with glue using your handy glue stick.
Take the cake pop stick or your twig or straw and roll the triangle around it.
Continue rolling over and over until the whole triangle is now a small roll.
We added a little bit of more glue to the tip of the triangle to make sure it sticks and that the roll won’t undo itself.
Keep making as many rolls as you like. It takes about 20 (half-inch) rolls to make a child’s necklace.

Next, I let my youngest take the needle and thread to get it ready to “sew.” I made the knot after she threaded the needle. Then we added the large button and attached it to the thread with the thread itself on one end of it.

Sister was excited to thread her rolled-up triangles until her plain button thread and needle started to look more like a necklace. I finished up the thread by making a loop to pass the button through. It worked as a beautiful clasp for the necklace. Didn’t it turn our great?!

Simple & Fun Recycled Magazine Crafts for the Family

Here are some other awesome projects you can make using magazines and a few other materials that you probably already have at home. Go ahead! Give one a try! Recycle and have fun at the same time!

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