Repurposed Placemats

On a mission to find cute placemats for a dinner party I was having this past Sunday, I ran into Pier One. I found these placemats that were made from magazine articles all sewn together. I didn't purchase those, but the idea stayed fresh in my mind, and once everyone had left the house, I knew just what I would be staying up late to create. My own repurposed magazine placemats... only more colorful.




As it turns out, they are super-duper easy to make and only took me about an hour to make 2 placemats. I used 2 Modern Brides magazines for mime. (my favorite magazine ever!) I just tore out the advertisements that were brightly colored or that had interesting photos/graphics. Don't worry if you didn't tear the entire page evenly, I went through and trimmed each page to about 3/4 to 1/2 the size of the original page. Fold the torn pages in half, and then in half again and in half one more time. (3 folds all together) I used 20 strips of paper for each place mat. I took a piece of scotch tape, sticky side up and arranged the strips of paper so that the edges were stuck to the tape. This made sewing so much easier! I just sewed down the length of each placemat about 12 times, and then took the tape off. If you want to seal them, which you probably will, you can use a few coats of matte or gloss mod-podge for paper, or clear contact paper.

Hopefully this is easy enough to follow along, but if you'd like, I can always make another quick placemat and take step-by-step photos? They really are so simple and fun to make. Hope you like them!!! I'm thinking of making some scapbook paper this same way too. It'd be a great way to re-use my ever growing stash of magazines!