Sunday, February 5, 2012

Embroidered bookmarks

About a month ago I spotted a clever bookmark project by Heather Hales.  It's similar in principal to the elastic loops riveted onto some of my journals - you wrap them around the hunk of journal between the cover and the page you're marking - but with a felted wool medallion for the cover of the book.  An embroidered medallion.  What's not to love?

I made a pair of my own to donate, along with some bookstore gift certificates, to a silent auction at one of my local schools.  The school crest is wine with gold, so I tried to mimic that with materials left over from other projects and made use of a tool I'd bought for cutting fabric circles (which was not, frankly, all that - I'll try it with some other fabrics and see if it works any better.)


Not to be hampered by my complete lack of fancy embroidery skills, I made do with running stitch.  Similarly, I substituted a blanket stitch border for pretty scalloped one that Heather did.

Then of course I had to figure out how to label them, because I wasn't presenting them with an actual book (sorry, nobody's getting my Judy Boltons anytime soon).  In the end I decided on explanatory tags:


In case you make some too and are in the same boat, mine read rather encouragingly "hand embroidered elastic bookmark - hug the band around the cover to the page you're marking, and rest your book in style!"


They were quick to make - I knocked them off in an evening and about half an hour of the next morning, part of the time having been spent deciding on designs . And I managed to secure the elastic in place with any stitches that ran past it.  You can see on the one above that a whole row of stitches runs along the centre of the elastic.  The one below got caught with every spiral.


I'd do this again I think... but I think they'd be so much cuter with colour elastics.  White is nice in a waistband, but bright orange or red would be pretty fantastic on a book, don't you think?

No comments: