Make a bowl out of old magazines!

Recently I discovered "A Little Hut", a blog about paper crafting by Patricia Zapata. It was voted the #1 Mom Craft Blog on Babble.com. Surfing the pages of her blog I saw that the recognition was well earned. The site catalogs a plethora of innovative paper designs with concise, easy-to-follow directions accompanying them. I urge you to check it out. You will be happy you did! Anyway, in my exploration I discovered a tutorial on making a bowl from old magazines! This was a perfect activity for me to do — sometimes I need a craft to do all on my own — for myself, and this one called to me. You can find directions here. Please go check it out, and leave her a little comment love. We all like it :)

Here is a visual walk-through of the process.

Simple materials needed — Magazines and a glue gun! That's it! The strips were made by folding the magazine pages in half 8 times length-wise.

The beginning coil. A thin bead of glue keeps it together.

I discovered the use of a clip not only keeps the fold of the leading magazine strip secure, but it also serves as a placeholder later on in the project.

When the coil base got to be about 5 inches in diameter, I started building the walls up gradually. (Raising the "walls" about an eighth of an inch at each go around.) Note that the neater side of the coil base should face up as this is the side people will mostly see. When building the walls up, however, I flipped the position of the strips, so that the neat-sided fold was shown on the outside of the bowl (which means the neat side was found on the bottom edge of the strip)

Here it is done! The diameter of the lip of the bowl measures 10 1/2 inches. The height of the bowl came to 5 inches.

View flipped over.

I used almost one Woman's Day magazine, one William-Sonoma catalog and probably 1/2 of a Martha Stewart's Living Magazine. Next time I will omit Woman's Day, as I realized I don't really like the colors of the inks, and the paper seems low quality. I liked the sheen of the Williams-Sonoma catalog, and the colors seemed more organic. It would be fun to be more conscious of a color scheme next time.

My BOWL! A few hours of work was well worth it for this lovely utilitarian piece of art that cost pretty much nothing! I like that!