Recycled Magazine Gift Bows

I definitely can't take credit for this idea. However, after my experiment with repurposing newspaper into gift bags I began to wonder about other ways to recycle paper. Specifically I had a great deal of magazines that had yet to make it into the recycling bin that I was hoping to reuse.




Can you tell I like girly magazines?

 After a bit of research I found some great articles on making bows out of magazines and tried my hand at it.

First I tore out colorful pages of the magazine that I liked.

I was feeling inspired by the pastels in this clinic ad and was also into the black and orange pages in spirit of Halloween. 


Next, I cut the pages into strips. I ended up with 8 strips per page, so 16 strips total.

The rest is mostly just a folding and manipulating game.

1.

Take the first strip and fold one end over to create a loop.

2.

 Follow the same step with the other end the strip creating almost a figure 8.






3.


 Add a second strip to the back. Always place the color you want to see on the finished product out or away from you.







4.

Fold each end of the second strip in the same manner as the first. Then add a third strip and repeat the same steps.







Once finished this process, I ended up with something that looked somewhat like a star...

I stapled my bow together at this point to make it easier to handle. Then, I repeated the entire process again, ultimately ending up with two stars.

I then took the second star I had created and simply sat it inside of the first star, matching the center points together.

I again stapled the bow together. Finally I added a small loop of paper in the center with tape to hide the staples.
My final project turned out like this...

I got a little bow happy after my first success and created quite a few of them! It really hardly took any time at all once I got the hang of handling the paper.

On some of the bows I added more than two layers of "stars". For fuller bows it is easy to just continue adding strips until the bow takes on the shape you want. I guess I have no excuse to buy bows this year come the holidays. I'm thinking that these will come in handy for the two upcoming weddings I have as well!