How To Craft a Table Using Old Magazines

If there’s anything we have too many of in our apartment, it’s magazines and plants. So we solved the problem by re-purposing six magazines (and that’s all you need—no glue or scissors required!) into this plant stand. It took about ten minutes. Here’s how:

We were inspired by a project done by our friend Erica. She has the coolest job of anyone we know: she crafts and does the store design for Anthropologie. We snapped the photos below when we visited her home in Portland, Oregon. She was working on the idea at that point, and then the vintage books popped up in stores a few months later.

The concept is similar to cardboard furniture. It’s amazing how sturdy the paper can be when it involves multiple layers. We were thinking a single magazine could work as a wall shelf…let me know if anyone tries it or if you have any other uses!

Materials
Old magazines. That’s it!

1 Pull out any subscription cards from inside the magazine. (And subscribe if you like it—it’s so much cheaper than buying off the newsstand!)
2 Flip open the magazines and leave the cover out to the left. Thumb through (about) ten pages, then fold them in half towards you, tucking the page ends back towards the binding. The crease should be on the right side, and the loose ends should be on the top.
3 Repeat for the entire magazine, including the back cover. (It’s okay to vary the number of pages a little, so don’t worry about counting them.)
4 Fold the cover to the right, over the first crease, and tuck it in towards the binding to secure the folded pages. You’ll have a semi-circle fan shape.
5 Repeat for any other magazines. Place them back to back, with the flat sides together. If you’re stacking two on top of each other, rotate the second layer a few degrees so that they stack like bricks, and not directly on top of each other. This will make them more stable.