Easy Homemade Gifts

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How to Make a Romantic Bookmark

This romantic bookmark is a lovely little homemade craft to make for yourself, or for gift giving on Valentine's Day or Mother's Day. Perfect to include with a classic romantic novel like Gone with the Wind or Jane Eyre.

Copyright © 1999-2008 Susan Spatone All rights reserved.
Published with permission from CraftAtHome.com

Material:

Ribbon (1 sheer and 1 solid)
Paper (textured rice paper, card stock, homemade paper)
Craft Glue
Plastic Button (or scrapbook charm)
Dimensional Fabric Paint (mushroom colour and pearl white)

How to:

Cut two eight inch pieces of ribbon, one from sheer ribbon and one from a solid piece of ribbon. You can use any width of ribbon you like for this project but you will need to place the widest ribbon on the bottom of the bookmark.

I used textured rice paper for this bookmark. Simply cut a square a little larger than your ribbon (refer to photo) with either specially scissors (I used deckle cut) or tear the edges as evenly as possible. Straight cut edges are not as attractive for this project. Cut another square, slightly smaller and another square slightly smaller than the last.

My rice paper was a solid white and to add colour, I simply diluted a mushroom coloured paint with water (two parts water to one part paint) and painted the paper, making sure it was completely saturated and not being very careful to keep the colour even (I wanted an aged worn effect). I only coloured the two larger pieces and left the smaller piece white. Allow your paper to dry completely before continuing. With your dimensional paint, paint a small outline around the small white paper. Simply add irregular lines and dots. Set aside and allow the paint to dry completely.

Take your largest square of paper and place your solid ribbon on top, allowing the ribbon to extend up the paper about 1 inch (refer to photo for paper and ribbon placement). Glue in place. Glue your sheer ribbon directly on top of the solid ribbon. Lining both ends up with each other. Take your second largest square and place it on top of the two ribbons, lining up your paper with the larger square. Glue your painted piece of paper to the top, once again lining up the edges. The heart that I used is simply a very inexpensive plastic button that I recently purchased at Michaels (but very pretty). Scrapbook charms would also work very well.

There are some very pretty plastic buttons (or scrapboook charms) available that will look wonderful on this bookmark. If needed, cut the back loop off the back of your button with a pair of small wire cutters and glue your button to the centre of your top square. Allow the glue to dry completely and trim the bottom ends of ribbon on an angle.