I love magazines. I don’t care what you say. Their pages are shiny and colorful and filled with images and words, two things I love. I don’t buy magazines in the store, though. If I want one, I order a subscription to it. Right now, I have a subscription to a couple of photography magazines, Southern Living, and Better Homes and Garden.
Better Homes and Garden was free. It was my prize for winning….something. I can’t remember what. The thing about them is, apparently no one really buys this magazine because they really like to give away subscriptions. This is my second time being blessed with a free subscription, and the last time I couldn’t beg them to stop sending it to me. You see, I don’t read it. I don’t think I’ve cracked a single issue since the subscription began. My association with the Better Homes and Garden issue that arrives each month is look at the cover, think to myself, “Pretty…” and then put the magazine in a stack where it stays completely unread.
So, yesterday I’m staring at this stack of magazines, and I started wondering to myself what creative things I could do with them. Remember when you had days in elementary school where you cut out things from magazines and did stuff with them? Like, artsy stuff. Yeah, something along those lines. My next step was to do what people do when they are looking for ideas. Consult The Oracl….I mean Google. What I came up with was this…
A neato mosquito shelf made of two back-to-back unread Better Homes and Garden issues. I think this purpose serves them well, yes?
I found a tutorial on it, but I had to do mine a bit differently because dang if I could get the magazines to behave as she said they should. Maybe they were ticked because I never read them. It was nothing a half a dozen paper clips couldn’t handle, though! Here’s what you do:
1. Take a magazine and fold the pages back towards the spine about 10 pages at a time, and push into the spine to secure. Leave front cover out for now.
2. Repeat until all the pages are folded back.
3. Fold front cover to the right away from the spine and secure it to the first fold with a paper clip. Repeat on the other side.
4. Now flip it over and do the same to the other end.
5. Now, take a second magazine and do the exact same thing. Stand them on end, squished together with the spines touching, and voila! You’re finished.
Now, put something on that bad boy and admire your handy work!
