Here’s how to make a rad bookmark for all your summer binge-reading
There’s nothing quite like curling up with a good book—or several, if you, like me, tend to juggle multiple pieces of reading material at once. Luckily, this week’s craft can help you keep track of your reading: a colorful embroidered bookmark, with a little tassel to make finding where you left off a snap. It’s the perfect accessory for your summer reads. I plan on pairing mine with my shiny new copy of A Tale of Two Besties!
Materials:
- Brightly colored felt
- 2 skeins of brightly colored embroidery floss
- Tagboard
- Embroidery needle
- Straight pins
- Scissors
- Ruler
- Ballpoint pen
Craft away:
- Fold the felt in half, short end to short end, with right sides touching, and pin the felt together to keep it from shifting. Use the ruler to draw a rectangle onto the felt, 2-inches wide by 7-inches long. Cut along the felt. You should now have two rectangular pieces of felt of identical size.
- Take one piece of felt and flip it so that the wrong side is facing up. Use the ruler and the ballpoint pen to make 1-inch marks along the sides of the piece of felt, and connect them to make long diagonal lines.
- Cut a few feet of embroidery floss, and thread the embroidery needle. Knot one end of the floss.
- Stitch with the floss to fill in the diagonal stripes on the felt, keeping your knots on the wrong side of the fabric (the side with the pen lines). Once you have completed a row of stitches, sew back the other way to create solid lines of floss. Continue until you have filled in all of the stripes.
- Measure and draw a rectangle onto the tagboard, 1 3/4-inches wide by 6 3/4-inches long. Cut out the rectangle.
- Make a tassel for your bookmark. To do this, first cut a 6-inch long piece of embroidery floss. Then cut 10 2-inch long pieces of floss. Fold the shorter pieces in half, and tie one end of the 6-inch long piece around the bundle to hold it in place. Trim the ends of the floss as needed to create a little tassel.
- Put your whole bookmark together by placing the blank piece of felt down first, then the tassel towards the end of the felt, then the tagboard, then the embroidered piece of felt. Line up the edges, and pin them to hold them in place.
- Use the embroidery floss and the needle to stitch around the outside of the bookmark. Once you have stitched completely around the bookmark in one direction, sew back the other way to create the look of a solid line with the floss.
- Use your new bookmark with your next read!
