Reusing Old Calendar Magnets

Intro: Reusing Old Calendar Magnets

Combine an old magnet, some colored paper or wallpaper scraps, some glue and scissor work and you get a custom fridge magnet for displaying pictures. This is a quick and easy project to do with kids. Promotional magnets are given away by banks and other businesses for advertising purposes. If you don't have any kicking around you can request free samples (often out of date calendars or runs with errors) from many manufacturers.

The fine folks at Howcast used this project as inspiration for the following video.

Any mention of this project must provide a link to www.zieak.com with credit to Ryan McFarland.

You'll need:
A fairly large flat flexible magnet
Some colored paper, wallpaper scraps, stickers or an old book with illustrations
Scissors
Glue
A pencil

STEP 1: Cut Out New Clothes for the Old Magnet

Trim the magnet if you need to make it square. You can save the scrap pieces to make small magnets by gluing small images right to them.

I used a page from a Dr. Seuss book. Hold the magnet behind the image you want to use and hold up to a light or a window. Position the magnet to capture what you like of the page. Place the magnet and page upside down on a table and trace around the magnet. Now you can trim around the tracing leaving about a half inch the whole way around. Cut the corners off as shown in the third picture.

STEP 2: Glue the Page to the Magnet

Use a glue stick, contact cement or mod podge to attach the page to the magnet.

STEP 3: Variations

To simplify this even more just take stickers you like and put them on magnets you don't. Then just trim the excess off.

Or cut a window out of the center of your magnet (easily done on a cutting board with a utility knife or hobby knife). Then use the magnet to frame photos on your fridge.

Comments

[svolpa]

Holy MOly dont people realize that books are damaged and thrown away everday! What an awesome idea to utilize a book that the have ripped out pages , partially water damaged, colored in...Yard sales are a great way to get books cheap!

[ncephas07]

the fact that my favorite book of all time was just cut up, hurt my heart, but i do love the idea

[Jyssa]

OMG you chopped up cat in the hat.... very cool magnets (I love the ladybirds!!) but chopping Dr. Seuss...that's just sacrilegious.

[Rokko8652]

Lol, don't drown, it will ruin your day XD

[TRMite]

I'm a librarian and we are often throwing away children's books that are damaged from so much use. making a magent out of a book that would otherwise end up trashed is a great idea. I love it!

[ReenieSR]

Why not just do a Google IMAGE search, save the graphic, print out on a color printer and then paste it on your magnet?

[zieak]

Hmmm - perhaps i should have mentioned that i buy books at garage sales and i actually have three copies of The Cat in the Hat. I only destroyed one of them!

[benjamenjohnson]

I do admit it looks cool, but you destroyed The Cat in the Hat! Shame! I would suggest maybe scanning the artwork from a book instead.