Rainbow Shoe Mat

Looking for a spot to store your shoes while adding a little pizzazz to your home? Here's a shoe mat that provides both! Next time you find yourself shut in on a rainy afternoon with a surplus of magazines, weave yourself this beautiful, inexpensive home base for your footwear.

Here's what you'll need:

• Magazines

• Duct Tape

• Glue (optional)

• Clear plastic binder pages

• twine

• First, take your magazines and tear out pages (this is also fantastic for unleashing any pent-up frustrations you may have). Art magazines and other image-based publications are ideal.
• Organize your pages into piles by the dominating color: red, yellow, orange, etc.

• Take a page and tear it in half. Take the half-sheet and fold the left and right sides, so that they overlap. If you want, glue the sides down to keep them in place. Repeat until you have at least several dozen strips (I think I made about 200).

Be sure to keep your strips sorted in their respective color piles.

• Take your duct tape and pull off a strip.
• Lay ten strips from one of your color piles over the duct tape, leaving enough tape so that you can fold it over the bottom edge of the strips.
• Take additional strips and weave them horizontally through the vertical strips.
• Trim off any excess strip and tape the edges of the mat with duct tape to secure it.

• Continue step four until you have made mats for all your color groups: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. I also made black-and-white mats. For this project I made two mats for each color, but you can vary the amount depending on your needs.

• Place each of the mats inside your clear plastic sheets. Take two plastic sheets, lay them back to back, and tie together with twine using the binder holes running along the edge of the sheets. Repeat for remaining sheets.

• Arrange mats as needed to accommodate your closet space.

Voila! Now you have a pretty place to set your shoes, while the plastic covers allows for easy clean-up of dirt and dust you may have tracked into the house.