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Bookmarks made from scraps - featuring Elmer's products
I love to read. I also love to papercraft, so my bag of paper scraps is getting heavy and outrageous.
Why not make some cool and functional bookmarks while using up some of my smaller paper scraps?
First, I use my X-ACTO Guillotine Paper Trimmer to cut down pieces of scrap paper into strips, choosing paper of coordinating colors from my bag 'o' scraps. The widths of the pieces can be plenty of different sizes, but the main point is to make sure they are nice and square, meaning that the tops and bottom edges are parallel to each other, even though they're rectangles...
The base is a bookmark-sized piece of cake box. I love the thickness of that material, and it's cheap. We all love cheap! Next, using my Elmer's Craft Bond All-Purpose Glue Stick, I glue on the strips, keeping them flush to one another to hide the cake box label.
Here is what the back will look like when you're done gluing. But wait, there's all sorts of paper hanging off the sides! That looks horrible!
So I whipped out my X-ACTO Guillotine Paper Trimmer and simply sliced off the pieces that were hanging off the edges. You can even slice off a bit of the cake box, too, to get an even cleaner edge.
With the edges trimmed down, the bookmark looks much more bookmark-esque and clean, don't you think?
Next, I used the X-ACTO Corner Rounder Punch to round out the corners and make it fancy. It takes a little muscle to get through the cake box, so make sure you're punching on a sturdy surface.
Now for the decorating. I like my bookmarks to have a nice focal point, so I added this drawing of a dude that I cut out from an old Reader's Digest book. Next, I used Elmer's Painters Pens to add a border and more decoration.
I love these Painters Pens, seriously. They do a great job of writing on all different types of surfaces and papers.
The finishing touch is adding some novelty yarn to that will be attached to the top of the bookmark. First, I used a 1/8" punch to make a hole in the top center of the bookmark. That's a pretty small hole, and can be tough to thread novelty yarn through, so I like to take a small-headed needle and pierce it through the centers of my yarn pieces.
Then I can thread that needle, pointy-side first into the hole, making it much easier to tie off and attach the yarn.
And it's done. My paper scrap stash is just a wee bit lighter, and I've got a fancy bookmark to hold my place.
