I wanted to create something small for the preschool classmates of both of our kids – a little parting gift as they head off into summer break. I thought that bookmarks would be nice, as I know our kids will be reading a lot this summer!
The sentiments and most of the images are from Avery Elle’s This Book, but the hearts are from Avery Elle’s Special Delivery. The adorable panda is from Mama Elephant’s Incoming Mail, and the constellations and stars are from Simon Says Stamp’s Seeing Stars. I stamped everything in Memento Tuxedo Black ink onto Neenah Solar White 80 lb cardstock. I used my MISTI to help line everything up, and this was especially helpful since I was making multiples (32 of each bookmark). I measured ahead of time to see how many stamped bookmarks I could fit onto a letter-sized piece of cardstock, and was able to fit 8 per sheet. This gave me enough room between each bookmark to use the Avery Elle Bookmark die to cut them out after coloring and laminating.
I used my brand new Prismacolor Premier colored pencils (one of my Mother’s Day gifts from my husband and kids!) to color in the images. I was short on time so I didn’t do any fancy blending on these images; however, the pencils are very nice and smooth so I will have to play around with them more! I thought it would be fun to have the owl standing on top of a stack of rainbow colored books, but only colored the stars on the panda bookmarks.
Once all the images were colored in, I tucked each sheet into laminating pouches and ran them through my laminator to give them some durability. Notice how the laminating darkens the colors and makes them more solid! After all the sheets were laminated, I cut them down in half so they would fit in my Big Shot. I used the Avery Elle Bookmark die, held in place with some low tack tape, and cut each bookmark out. Each bookmark has two lengths (9″ each) of gray striped baker’s twine fed through the opening at the top to create a little fringed pull.
I knew I wanted to “package” these bookmarks in an open-topped container, so I went through my dies and found a Pillow Box set from Sizzix. I used Neenah Desert Storm 80 lb cardstock to make the pillow boxes, and was able to get 2 boxes (4 pieces) from each letter-sized sheet. Before assembling the boxes, I pulled out my MISTI again and stamped some images onto the front of each box from Lawn Fawn’s Happy Summer in Memento Tuxedo Black ink. For the backs of each box, I used the “from:” from This Book, and spelled out each of my kids’ names with Lawn Fawn’s Harold’s ABC’s.
I folded the scored flaps on each box piece with my teflon bone folder, and ran a line of tape along each flap with my ATG. Once the pieces were adhered, I only folded in the bottom flaps of the boxes so that the bookmarks could peek out of the open tops.
