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Crafts of Christmas Past... Ripped from the Glossy Pages of Old Magazines

Compiled by Vicki McClure Davidson

How many times have you thumbed through a beautiful, glossy home-improvement or craft magazine, found a festive Christmas craft that looked like it would be inexpensive and fun to make, carefully ripped the page out, filed the page in a drawer or box to save for future use, and then never again found the time (or energy) to sift through a multitude of OTHER saved holiday craft project pages ripped from magazines, to find it again?

Or, do you save magazines, or pages torn from magazines, in bags or boxes in your garage or basement because there was one really intriguing Christmas project in each, a project that you planned to launch as soon as you had the time to dig through all those dusty boxes?

Yeah, us, too.

Old glossy-paged holiday magazines have so many creative ideas in them, we don't want them to be tossed out into the garbage and forgotten.

How many wondrous magazine craft projects have faded into obscurity over the decades? Likely thousands, possibly millions.

It's sad, really.

In this section of Frugal Café, we are searching for and bringing back crafts of "Christmas Past." Crafts that appeared years ago in holiday-issue magazines, but are still fun, contemporary, and inexpensive to make. The key here is that they MUST be inexpensive to make—holiday crafts requiring pricey materials or tools will likely not be included, no matter how cool they are. We want to adhere to the mission and philosophy of the Frugal Café.

In so doing this, we hope to preserve and resurrect many of those forgotten magazine pages of yuletide craft projects for you and another generation of thrifty crafters to create and enjoy during the holidays. These archives will keep these creative ideas alive and in the mainstream for frugal crafters, where they belong.

Many of these craft projects are appropriate and simple enough for younger children to make if they are supervised by an adult.

Check back often, as we will be updating this Crafts of Christmas Past directory on a regular basis.

To view the magazine craft pages, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader for some of the pages (some are in pdf format). We're still experimenting with how to best scan and convert them so that they aren't bloated in size, but still have decent viewing quality.

For example, the first one below is acceptable for the quality of the images, but the text is still a tad bit fuzzy. We're using different software in our conversion and have not yet figured out the best method to keep the text crisp and the file size small. Our apologies. We will continue working at it, and hope to replace the "fuzzy ones" after the holidays with better-quality ones. We know that some of our frugal visitors have limited bandwidth, so we are striving for a balance between smaller file size and reasonable clarity of text and images.

Crafts of Christmas Past Directory

"Decorating: Displaying Christmas Cards"
Appeared in Martha Stewart Living, December 1998 / January 1999
Text by Amy Conway | Photographs by Dana Gallagher | Length: 5 pages, color | Size: 467 kb (large pdf file, may take a few extra seconds to load)
Easy, Elegant, & Cheap: "Yum – Holiday Centerpiece of the Month"
Appeared in Every Day with Rachael Ray, December 2006 / January 2007
Photography: Antonis Achilleos | Prop Stylist: Lynda White | Length: 1 page, color | Size: 97 kb (pdf file)
"Holiday Organizer and Inspiration Book"
Appeared in Martha Stewart Living, December 1998 / January 1999
Length: 1 page, color | Size: 13 kb (html file)
"Christmas Baking-Pan Wall Sconces"
Appeared in Martha Stewart Living, December 1999 / January 2000
Photography: Anna Williams (left), Charles Maraia (lower right) | Length: 1 page, color | Size: 93 kb (pdf file)
Frugal, but Elegant Winter Still Life: "Arrangement of the Month – Pine Arrangement"
Appeared in Martha Stewart Living, December 1999 / January 2000
Photography: Anna Williams | Length: 1 page, color | Size: 127 kb (medium-size pdf file, may take a few extra seconds to load)
"12 Drummers Drumming: Gift Box Drums"
Appeared in Martha Stewart Living, December 1999 / January 2000
Photography: Gentl & Hyer | Text: Jesse Foley Brink | Length: 2 pages, color | Size: 176 kb (large pdf file, may take a few extra seconds to load)

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Crafts of Christmas Past... Ripped from the Glossy Pages of Old Magazines

Crafts of Christmas Past Directory