In this article, I will teach you how to make a multi-purpose box out of pages from an old magazine. Some uses of this box include, but are not limited to:
- Orange peels
- Peanut shells
- Fish bones
- Coins or loose change
- Keys
I had always used these boxes, but never had to make them because it’d always appear “magically” at home.
It is only now that I’m here, alone in Australia, that I have to make my own boxes.
Frustrations
Feeling frustrated that I had no where to put my orange peels or remnants of the fruit I eat, I sent my mom an e-mail requesting instructions on how I might go about making one of these boxes.
The instructions she sent me were so good, illustrated beautifully, that I thought it was well worth sharing it on this site. View the instructions by clicking the thumbnail below:
Pushing the Concept Further
Tip 1: What my family normally does is to open up one box to keep all the other “closed” boxes (as shown in the image on the left). This keeps the whole lot of them really tidy. Have fun!
Tip 2: Got a pet? And got food scraps? Use these as one-use pet trays. Every time we have fish for dinner, we always throw some fish bones into one of these boxes. Then we put it next to our cat’s food dish, and he’d eat the fish from it.
It saves us the trouble of washing the tray, as it normally just contains dried food and requires very infrequent washing.
Note: The strength of the box really depends on the quality of paper you use. Some paper, like those from the publications with financial statements that many large companies send their shareholders are exceptionally well suited for this endeavour. The magazine that I used in the picture above was “Muscle Mag” (given free with the protein powder I purchased). The paper was painfully thin, but it’d get the job done nonetheless. For more heavy duty use, like for the pet-tip above, use higher quality paper.
Donn, fragments 