What to do with old magazines?

Millions of people around the world read magazines for a lot of reasons. For example, to stay updated with current Fashion Trends, to keep an eye on the Stock Market ups and downs, to learn new things, for fun or just to kill time.

Though the Internet has been around for years now, yet the magazine industry has kept on growing. A lot of people still prefer reading magazines on paper rather than on the net. And I'm one of those people. I've been an avid internet and fashion magazines reader for years now and I yet enjoy it a lot.

Why?

Of course I never realized I was piling up all of them and the collection would grow so large. Lol. Yup, ask a regular reader and he'll tell you, magazines do take a lot of room space. I bought a magazine rack at first, when that became full I stored my magazines in my cupboard and the time soon came when I was out of cupboard space too. Well I eventually had to do something; I didn't want my room to look like a magazine shop.

Ahh...a solution!

So what did I do? I tore my magazines (that I no longer read). O.k now, don't panic (by tearing I don't mean shredding the magazines into pieces). Why did I do it? Here's why.

(a) My top reason being, they take a lot of space as I wrote earlier.

(b) They get dusty pretty quickly and it's a boring job dusting magazines.

(c) There's repetitive content a lot of times.

(d) I only read topics of my interest; the rest of the stuff is useless for me.

(e) If I want to look for an article or something and I've forgotten the issue it was in, I have to go through every magazine to find it. Sheesh, which can take a lot of time.

(f) Think about it, why store all those magazines when you can use them for other stuff?

What's to be picked?

What I did was picked out the magazines I don't read anymore. I tore out pages from them, and cut out the stuff that I wanted to keep and recycled the left overs. What can you find in magazines for cut outs? Let's see:

(a) Fashion (that includes Clothing and Accessories)
(b) Cosmetics and Skin Care Products
(c) Celebrity Photographs
(d) Stuff for Kids
(e) Home Décor and Garden stuff
(f) Tutorials
(g) Tips and Tricks
(h) Information about Holiday Destinations
(i) Important Phone Numbers, Addresses and Websites ( shopping malls, designers etc)

Pick out what is important for you and store the cut outs in a box or if you want to get creative then read on for more ideas.

Make Books

You can make different types of books from the cut outs. They can be for a certain category or everything mixed up. For example, if you have home made beauty recipe cut outs you can make a little booklet containing all those cut outs and when you want to try any of those recipes you will already know where it is. It's rather convenient to store certain stuff in one place then having to look for it in the magazine every time.
Here are a few ideas for the kind of books you can make.

Fashion book: Crazy about fashion? Then we're definitely alike. Now in a fashion book, you can either include clothing and accessories or makeup and other utensils as well. Its all up to you.

Beauty tips: Like I mentioned earlier. Collect all of your beauty tips and remedies in a booklet. It'll be an easy search and a time saver.

Recipe book: Create your own little recipe books. Just paste your favorite recipe cut outs and get started with your cooking.

Home and Garden décor book: Almost all magazines have a home and garden section. Cut out the styles you like and save them in a book for future reference.

Tutorials: You might have seen those do it yourself sections in some magazines. Just like all of the above cut out and paste your favorites and try them out whenever you feel like it.

Save important phone numbers and addresses: There's a directory at the end of every magazine containing contact information about brands, designers and stores. You might want to save those too as they do come in handy.

Get help with Assignments

Cut outs and great help when it comes to assignments, especially for students of fashion and interior design and also for students related to other studies about media. A creative mind and right choice of cut outs may boost up scores.
Plus, there are a lot of useful articles in magazines. They can come in handy when you're working on a project or preparing a report about a certain subject. Examples, Politics, Celebrities, Media, Society etc.

Mood Boards

If you're a fashion design student, then you'll be very much familiar with mood boards. For those who don't know, mood boards are fashion illustrations made out of cuttings from magazines, relating to an object for example a piece of jewelry or anything else.
So magazines play a good part in this area as well. You can buy older issues because they'll cost cheaper and get creative with designing mood boards.

Make Greeting Cards

O.k. I know this doesn't sound very interesting. You're probably thinking why waste time on preparing greeting cards when there are millions available on the net for free. Well you have a point there but, what's also true is that electronic greeting cards don't have a personal charm or touch. It's going to lie in the inbox and that's about it. And as far as I know, people would still prefer something that is hand made because it makes a person feel special.
You can pick out a lot of stuff from magazines such as graphics, cartoons or even quotes to decorate your greeting cards. 

Room and Garden Décor

Decorate your room with graphics and cartoons from magazines. Girls can pick flowers, hearts and celebrity photos etc and boys can pick pictures or cars, gaming consoles or graffiti graphics etc
You can create funky posters too. Use your imagination and work with graphics and text letters from magazines. They'd look a lot better than the usual ones.

I hope the post was helpful...xoxo