Turning ugly news into pretty stuff

I'm poor. I also have a lot of free time. So when I can craft things for free, I get pretty excited. The other thing about free crafts is that they almost always involve reusing materials that otherwise would have gone to waste. When I was working at a grocery store, I got really into crocheting and knitting with plastic bags. It was fun, but even more than that it was therapeutic. There were so many evenings where I would ride my bike home from work so frustrated with how many plastic bags I had seen leave the store that day. There was always some middle aged man barking "OF COURSE I NEED A BAG! ARE YOU CRAZY?" (usually he "needed" this bag for something like, oh, a single can of pop). Crafting with plastic bags became a kind of activism for me, as well as a release. My nerves were calmed. I could pick a bag up off the street on my way home and turn it into something pretty. I didn't feel as upset about over consumption when I could do a little something to offset waste.

Newspaper is my new thing. I remember reading in a zine once that mulching can be a really cool thing because you take really crappy news and do something really fabulous with it. Mulching becomes a therapeutic act in that you can take pictures of soldiers and the president and stalk brokers and turn them all into this thing that will prevent weeds from growing in your garden! (I for the life of me cannot remember what zine this one. If someone knows, please tell me.)

I was feeling pretty bummed out by every newspaper I saw back in December, so I decided to make newspaper baskets for Christmas. And it felt really nice; turning ugly news into pretty crafts.




A pretty good tutorial for magazine baskets can be found here.