Sunday, June 3, 2012

Bookmarks I: Doodly Redbirds

All papercrafting supplies were 40% off at Jo-Ann this week! I already have a bunch of stamps and embossing powder from when my friend showed us all how embossing powder is completely magical. And both Jo-Ann and Michaels were clearancing large portions of their clear stamp sections at that time, so I got quite a few stamp sets.

But. I love buying crafting supplies. Here was the sale: all I needed was some sort of flimsy excuse to buy things.

When my friends and I get together for crafting nights the point is more to get together than to make anything specific. I usually grab scraps of paper and stamp them once or twice to make bookmarks. I have a lot of books, you see, and I've always liked them each to have their own bookmarks. And it feels weird just to stamp scraps of paper and leave them scraps with no other purpose.

But a lot of my friend's scraps are too long to make good bookmarks for my paperbacks, or too short, or very wide. Apparently I have a very traditional idea of just what a bookmark should be, which is very silly if you think about it. It's not as if I haven't used my bus pass or a (clean) Kleenex or some piece of paper clutter as a bookmark many, many times.

But there was my excuse. Bookmark-making supplies. So I bought plain paper, and pretty paper, and some decorative bits, and a cool punch to make pretty corners, and a less-cool puch to make round corners, and a swivel-y thing to cut out shapes, and embossing pens, and more embossing powder, and ALL THE THINGS. Then I emailed my crafty friends and told them about this awesome sale, in reply to which I received only a silence indicating indicating that I was a crazy person.

Okay, yes, but crazy with lots of shiny new craft supplies.

On to crafting! Since a single 2" x 12" border strip makes two 6" bookmarks, I went ahead and made two very similar ones with the same materials and tools.

It took a couple of tries to get the hang of the ShapeXPress (a.k.a. the swivel-y cutter-thing) but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. Mmm, ovals.

This red embossing powder seems to have white bits in it. Am I heating it too much? The other brand of powder I have doesn't do this.

Supplies: