Magazine Inspiration

When I returned from Florida, I had these magazines waiting for me:

I was only gone for one week!!  I'm pretty sure all my monthly magazines are released within a week of one another, so it shouldn't have been that big of a surprise.  It was just that receiving them all at once was like a huge present for a magazine lover like myself.  Pinterest is great and all, but there is something extra special about holding a magazine and reading the articles.  A few of these subscriptions I purchase for myself, but most are either gifts (from my sweet Mom who knows how much I love my magazines:)!!) or free from deals I find on Hip2Save like this one.  (You just have to be careful not to sign up for automatic renewal, because then it will get expensive fast.)

Also, if you shop at a site like Magazines.com , and you link through a rebates website like ShopAtHome who frequently offer 30-50% cash back for shopping at Magazines.com, you can find really good deals on magazines.  It is very easy to open an account with ShopAtHome, and there is no catch.  You literally receive checks in the mail just for shopping online.  Anytime Bill or I make any purchase online, we check both ShopAtHome and Ebates to see which site offers the higher percentage for the store we are buying from.  It's hard to beat 'free' money!

Magazine subscriptions aside, I realized this week, that I have never shared my method for organizing the inspiration I find every month in my favorite magazines.  It'd be nice to save the magazines in their entirety and go back and re-look at them when I felt like it, but the reality is that I barely have time to go through them the first time.  My solution is simple: I'm a magazine page ripper:).  Here are the pages I've ripped out thus far from this month's HGTV magazine:

I rip out pages that speak to me.  It might be for a paint color that I like, or a product I'd like to try.  It might be a potential DIY project or just a beautiful overall space!

After I 'finish' a magazine, I put the ripped out pages into this basket in our kitchen:

 It's the bottom basket on our rainbow bookshelf:

And then I recycle the rest of the magazine.

After my basket fills, I sort the pages into DIY projects, 'Eye Candy' (that's where the beautiful spaces go) or recipes.  I then put the pages into binders where they serve as a reference for meal planning and room planning!

It's especially fun to look through my binders every now and then to remember project ideas I may have forgotten, or even to see how my style is evolving over time:).

I often mark the images so I know what caught my eye initially:

And with that, you now know how to score a cheap or free magazine subscription, and you also know how I keep the best ideas from the magazines I love without filling our house to the brim with the full magazine copies!!