Cardboard tubes are everywhere. They come in a lot of different shapes and sizes and the most common ones are the paper towel tube and the bathroom tissue tube. Chances are you go through a lot of them throughout the year. I say you should save them up and use them in arts and crafts projects!

In this tutorial I have a video and I show you a variety of different ways to think about them and use them. And I show you a variety of different things you can make with them.

Will has a youtube channel with over 700 videos on projects you can make. Check it out right here

Here is the video:

This picture shows my collection of cardboard tubes.

There lots of things you can make with paper towel tubes but before we talk about the actual projects lets look at the material of the tubes.

The material is very useful flattened out. It is kind of like cereal box cardboard or somewhere around 120 pound card stock. Cut open the tube and flatten it out.

And you have yourself a nice collection of heavy stock paper you can use for projects.

Here is a project I made with some flattened out tubes - A treasure chest.

You can cut strips from the tubes longitudinally and these are useful for a lot of projects.

You can also cut a spiral out of the tube. This gives the cardboard a very different feel and useability. And you can get very long lengths this way.

Here is a nice long piece I spiraled out of a paper towel tube.

I made this globe with the spiraled out material.

Another thing you can do is cut rings and glue use them in a variety of ways including gluing them together to make shapes. This series of rings is glued into a flat surface shape but you can also glue them to make 3d shapes.

Ok, we have given some thought to the material of the tubes and how to use that in some ways. Now let's take a look at how to assemble together tubes.

Continue Next I show you some ways to assemble them and put them together

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