Making bows from old magazines

Like many people I can lose a good hour or two to Pinterest, and I often pin craft things that I think I might make and usually I promptly forget about them in the hubbub of life. But when I saw this tutorial from How about Orange showing how to make gift bows from a magazine page I knew one day I'd be giving it a go.

I do like a good magazine and have quite a few here, including a large back catalogue of Good Food and Olive - don't worry I didn't use those. Usually I don't keep old copies of Good Housekeeping but on this occasion I'm glad I did.

I made the first one following the tutorial with strips 3/4" wide and while I was impressed with how easy it was to make, it was a little big for my liking. So I made another one with strips 1/2" wide and while this was a better size it was much more fiddly, but not impossible to do. Deciding to give it another shot I made another with strips 5/8" wide and that worked much better for me.

With the strips cut to varying lengths, I folded and twisted the eight lengths. Initially I found this confusing to do but soon got into a rhythm. For this stage I used a staple because it seemed a lot easier than glueing, and because I couldn't find the staple-less stapler I have! 

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Next I assembled each layer of the bow so the loops were evenly spaced and secured these. In the larger version I used a staple here too, but on the smaller versions I used glue dots (or part of glue dots).

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Then it's time to assemble the layers, again glue dots work well here.

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And finally add the shortest length rolled into a circle in the middle of your bow. 

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And there you have it, a gift bow.

Or in my case three gift bows! 

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I think they look great, and I'll be making some more - I chose colourful pages from the magazine, but I think you could use any page, even one full of text. I think you could also use the offcuts from wrapping paper for a coordinated effect. The possibilities are endless!

What do you think?

The Reading Residence
www.mrscraftyb.co.uk

Sunday Stationery: Letter stamps

This is one of my birthday presents from earlier in the year, and one I've not used as much as I should. It's a box of letter and number punches and my plan is to use them with my paper craft activities. I suspect they're more usually used to punch things into metal but I tried them with an ink pad and paper and they work ok.

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But, if you look more closely you'll see I need more practice with the E!

 

Sunday Stationery: The Geffrye Museum Notebook

I had a fab afternoon last week visiting The Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch. It's a museum of the home, set in some old Almshouses and is free (although donations are very much welcomed), and of course there's a shop which I didn't leave empty-handed.

I left with a notebook (no surprises there), some wrapping paper and some seeds. Today I'm just going to share the notebook as I've plans for the wrapping paper (and not the usual sort of plans) so I'll most likely share that another time.  There wasn't much choice of notebooks in the shop, but it didn't matter as this one caught my eye straight away, and the man in the shop assured me they were stocking up on notebooks very soon. That's good news for my future visits, but I'm still not sure how they knew I was coming!

FRONT

FRONT

REVERSE

REVERSE

And in case you're wondering the cover is an adaptation of a letter written by Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth about London in 1801. Who knew that Hipsters were around then?!

Inside the front cover there's a lovely Robert Macfarlane quote too: 

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I've no idea yet what I'll use this for, but I couldn't leave it on the shelf and I'm sure when the time comes I'll find a use that's just perfect for it.