Magazines

..........what to do with magazines

Personally I think magazines for the most part are unnecessary. The internet has made many things no longer necessary and that has a good and a bad side.

Pinterest and other sites are like magazines that you don't have to waste your time thumbing through because  you can go to the online pages that are of interest to you. There are a lot of creative ideas out there.

But if you do take magazines or if you have been gifted a subscription to magazines here are a few thoughts about what you can do with them:

• Recycle when you are finished with them.
• Donate them to nursing homes, assisted living facilities, hospitals and other such places. Perhaps your
  doctor or dental office would appreciate them. 
• Whatever you do with them remove your address before they leave your house.
• Save them, after editing if necessary, for crafts for your children----lots of ideas on Pinterest. I remember making Christmas trees out of old Reader's Digest magazines for our grandparents when my brother and I were little. And I had great fun pasting pictures into scrapbooks too, or using big letters cut out to use on homemade greeting cards and notes to friends.
• Altho' catalogs are best for this, you can use magazines to make paper dolls. I remember having great fun cutting out the pictures of women, men and children and clothes that, altho' they didn't fit perfectly, were still fun to play with.
• And, this is what I do now:  I go through them and tear out any pages I'd like to reference and I collect those old "magnetic" photo albums at second-hand stores or garage sales which usually cost about a quarter a piece, and stick them to the pages. I don't care if they are not archive-quality since I remove them from time to time. I arrange them decoratively, overlapping, adding pictures with captions or instructions over parts of the pictures. I have a file folder I place the pictures or recipes/articles in until I have time to sit and cut out and fit them into my albums which are arranged by category. When I am done I remove the address labels that are either mine or someone else's and recycle the rest of the magazines. When I am redecorating, landscaping, gardening, sewing, knitting, cooking or entertaining I get out the albums and thumb through them  for ideas.
  

I hope this little idea helps.