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Upcycled Materials: Newspaper Tube Crafts

Stack of newspapers

Crafters all around the world are making gorgeous projects with upcycled newspaper. There’s a huge range of things that can be made with this common waste material, so let’s explore the potential.

Have you been seeing things that look like this popping up in your crafting feeds?

They are gorgeous, and interesting, and made of rolled up newspapers. Let’s take a closer look at what people are doing with rolled up newspaper.

Step One: Roll the Newspaper

As with all papercrafts, success really depends on creating even, consistent newspaper tubes. Uniformity allows you to use all of them the same way, and creates strength.

(screencap from YouTuber craft gallery)

For that reason, it’s helpful to start all of your paper rolls around something consistent, like a length of wire, or a wooden skewer, so they all come out the same. It’s demonstrated really well in this video:

Step Two: Weave

Basically, once you have a large number of tubes, you treat them like any other fiber, and weave them.

Most of these crafts are made from weaving the tubes into various shapes, and some of them are just gorgeous. Check these out:

This box is ornamented with clay decorations that would be easy to make with air dry clay

Step Two Alternate: Squash and Roll

Some other projects are made by flattening and rolling the tubes, for an end result that is something like quilling:

Here are some more of the amazing things people are making from rolled up newspapers:

A cute organizer!
Beautiful figures!
This gorgeous trinket bowl!

I haven’t (yet) worked with rolled up newspaper myself, but I just love this innovative, upcycled papercraft. Crafters are so clever!

Featured photo by Wherda Arsianto on Unsplash

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