Style blogger Sara from Hello The Mushroom gets the most out of her fashion mags by using them in personal collages.
I love magazines, always have — ever since I was a kid I've had the habit of taking them apart and pasting my favourite bits into scrapbooks. When my grandmother was about to throw out random magazines, I'd always ask her to let me have a look and take out the pictures. What fascinated me the most back then was animals, fashion and Boy George (I grew up in the 80s, what can I say?).
This is something that I still do, and I find it quite satisfying: playing with scissors, glue, a pile of colourful magazines and transforming all that content into something new and more personal. It's hard to like everything you see in a particular issue and it's normal that some things won't exactly be your style, so why not just take out the best bits that really speak to you?
It's like creating your personal magazine that caters to your own style and inspirations, a bit like a multi-page mood board. Occasionally I like leafing through them to get new ideas on how to style something, or things to try with my current wardrobe.
Other times I do it just for the sake of making collages — the images can be inspiring and just beg to be transformed into something else, so I mix in some doodles and turn it into an illustration. I know you can do all these things digitally these days but there's just something so satisfying about the tactile experience of manipulating paper.
I admit that I save the best magazines like Vogue and don’t them and don't cut them up, thus contributing to my acute case of tsundoku (the constant act of buying books, but never reading them).
But there are others that are just perfect for it. Fashion mags are my favourites but if they have colourful pages, anything goes! There's always something that can look interesting, when put in a different context. At the moment I have a pile of torn out pages to go through in a filing box in my room, waiting to become my next scrapbook.
So what does everyone else do with their old magazines?
Get making your own collages with a subscription to one of our many fashion magazines.
