Ideas for Sewing Bookmarks from Scrap Fabric

One of my favorite things to give and get around the holidays, whether it's Christmas maybe a birthday, are books. And a lot of times I like to add a little bit of a personal touch to that and actually give a bookmark along with the book. So I have a couple variations of bookmarks that I've made here today. Just really quick, easy projects that can be made out of some scrap fabric and felt and I'm going to show you how to do that. So the first one is this really fun idea. It's just a little heart and it just fits on the corner of your pages, just slips right on there like that. And it actually stays in place really good. Like it's not gonna come off if you're worried about it, you could put it on the upper part of your page but it really just sit on there nicely as a cute little bookmark. I have another version of it here where I've added a little bit more color to the front of it by adding some just cotton fabric on top of my felt first before stitching it. And then my other one that I have is, again just a simple strip bookmark but I've just done some fun sort of a play on reverse applique. It's it's not quite reverse applique because we actually cut out our letters first and stitch it everything in place with our cotton layered in between but I'm gonna show you how to make both of those right now. So we'll start with our little heart one first. So you can see this takes really no fabric at all. Very small pieces of felt can be used for this project. And we need to start with a little template. So what I did was I actually started with just standard size sticky notes and I actually laid that on my page of my book. And I decided that, that covered about as much as I would want it to. Any bigger and I mean, it's really gonna cover a bunch of the page, any smaller and it might not have stayed in place. So this is the perfect size for this size of book. If you have a much larger book you might wanna make yours a little bit bigger. But all I did was I took just the pencil and I drew a little heart shape onto my sticky note. And then because I cannot draw two halves of a heart the same to save my life, I actually folded it in half and then went ahead and trim to make sure that both sides were perfect. So I have a nice symmetrical heart. Then all I needed to do is actually cut that out of fabric. So when I was making my little template I left one of the sticky edges on my heart. So that way it sort of helps hold it in place when I am going to cut out my little template here. So I went ahead and I have my felt folded in half. So I'm cutting both my layers at the same time. This ensures that even if I get a little bit off maybe when I'm cutting my template both my layers will still look exactly the same because I'm cutting them at the same time. I cut all the way around the outside just like that. You can see, I didn't quite get into the center of my heart as much as I'd like to so I can go back and cut out a little notch. And now I have perfect little heart pieces. So if you wanna be super meticulous and maybe you don't like a little bit of the point there you can actually take your scissors and do any trimming up and perfecting of your heart pieces now, before you stitch them together. Trim that one there a little bit, there now I'm happy with how it looks. So all I have to do from here is just stitch my two hearts together. So you can see with my finished sample here, I only went up to about where my straight parts ended on my template. So if I were to lay my template back on right around here is where I wanna start and stop stitching. So fleece holds itself together really well. So I'm not gonna worry about putting any pins in place or anything. I'm just going to simply stitch along these two straight sides of my heart. And I'm just going to stitch really close to the edge. I don't wanna stitch too far in because the further in I stitch, the less space that actually gives for my book pages. So I'm doing a couple of backstitches, gonna stitch all the way along the edge, get to the corner. I'm gonna go ahead and stop. My machine automatically does the needle down position, if yours doesn't, you can engage that or you can use your hand wheel to make sure your needle is down. Pivot and then just stitch along the other side. Again we'll do a couple backstitches at the end and we can go ahead and take it off. Now, in this case, I used white thread. So it does stand out a lot along the edge. If you didn't want it to stand out as much you can sort of pre-match your felt to your thread if you want. A lot of times felt is usually in a big stack at your fabric store and you can buy a bunch of different colors, usually a few cents a piece. And I just go through them and pick one of each color and then I'll go and find a thread that matches my fleece 'cause I find that thread comes in a few more shades of each color then the fleece does. So that's how I like to match my thread to my fleece. Now, if I wanted to make this little variation, it's the exact same thing. I would cut out my fleece squares. Then simply before I stitch my fleece hearts together I would just layer my other fabric piece on there and stitch around the outside edge. And then I could have a nice fancy front on my heart. Another way I can do this is if I want a little bit of outline around the outside edge of my front, say I really want this yellow here but I actually want to still be able to see some of the purple around the outside edge. I can lay my heart on my fleece, stitch it and then cut out around the edge, leaving just a little bit of that purple showing. So I have a little bit more decoration on the front. So that would be how you make your little hearts. And again, you can make either one of these variations and they're just super simple and slip right on the corners of your book pages. Now your next bookmark is just a little bit more complicated because we've got a lot more pieces involved. So all this is is we have two rectangles of our felt. There are two and a half inches by nine inches. I have one on the front, one on the back and then I have a piece of cotton fabric in the middle and I've just used some scrap cotton that I had left over from a fat quarter that I didn't use all of. So I have my pieces here. Now, I decided that I wanted fairly big letters on my bookmark. So I knew that I couldn't have a word that had too many letters in it. So I just picked something simple, like read and all I did was take just some notebook paper and sort of sketch out my letters. I wasn't worried about everything being perfect. You could simply go onto a Word document and print out block letters and cut them out that way. But I kind of just sketched mine out and you can see, I might've played around a couple of different sizes of the letters until I got them all about the same and then I cut them out. And then I went ahead and cut the letters out of the felt first. So now if you do a word like this you can see on the E the A and the D we're gonna have sort of this negative space in our letter that we'll need to transfer over which makes these letters a little bit more complicated to put on the bookmark. So if you want something just a little bit easier you can change up what you have at say. And in this case, I've done one that says love. And again, I've done the same thing. I just took that same piece of just notebook paper and just sketched out my letters. I used a heart instead of an O so I didn't have to worry about the center of that O. And again, I've simply cut them out of my felt. So decide what you want it to say. Maybe you want just even one letter or anything on there and cut them out of the front of your two and a half inch by nine inch piece of felt. Now we're going to layer everything together and stitch it. So I went ahead and cut a piece of my cotton fabric that is exactly one eighth of an inch smaller around all the sides so I can layer my two pieces of felt together and not have any overhang of the cotton fabric. If I cut everything at the exact same then I might be able to see a little bit of that after I lay it together. And that wasn't really the look I wanted. So I made it just a tiny bit smaller like so, so that it's nicely hidden inside. Layer my other piece of felt on top and then I'm gonna go ahead and put some pins in place because I have a lot of space cut out of this top piece and some of these areas on the edge are quite thin. I might find that it doesn't want to stay in places easily as just two big, large pieces of felt. So I'm gonna go ahead and put some pins in place. So everything stays nice and lined up. What we're gonna do is we're going to stitch the perimeter of this piece first before we start doing any stitching around the letters. Doing the perimeter first will make sure that everything stays lined up when you're maneuvering around the letters. Especially since you have a lot of directions you're gonna have to be changing going around the letters underneath your presser foot. You wanna make sure that everything is already held in place. So we're gonna put a couple more pins in and then stitch the perimeter just very close to the edge. So I'm gonna take my presser foot off real quick and bring it over here to show you what it is that I like to line up on when I'm doing a project like this. So on a lot of presser feet like this you have your little mark there in the center. In my case, it's a little indentation. A lot of times you might have a red line or some other mark that shows the center of your presser foot. And this is where you'll line up the edge of your fabric if you're stitching to either side. So in my case where my needle is set, bring my pen over here to point, my needle comes down right over here. So therefore I'm gonna align my fabric up with this mark. And that's gonna make sure that I have a nice, consistent perimeter all the way around the edge, especially if you're using a thread like white in this case is gonna stand out. So just sort of plan ahead as to where you wanna line up your fabric. So you know that everything is going to be nice and even around the outside edge. Okay, so you can start anywhere you want to on this project. I'm gonna just start in the middle of one of the long sides. And then we're just going to stitch all the way around the edge. Okay and this pin's pretty close to the edge. I'm gonna go ahead and take that one out so I don't stitch over it. Okay, get into a corner. Go ahead and stop, pivot, continue stitching. We're just gonna go all the way around the edge. Now, when you're getting up to those areas where you have one of those thinner pieces of have felt from where you've cut out your letter again, just make sure that everything stays in place while you're stitching. So if you have to leave your finger in place, sort of right until the last minute and then move it away, do that just so you make sure that everything stays nice and flat. Keep removing our pins as we go. And we're almost back around where we started. Now, when we started we didn't worry about doing any backstitching and I did that because when I come back around to where I started I'm just going to overlap my stitching. Overlapping will actually create a little less visible of a secured stitch whereas if I do backstitching I might have a really, a big stitch that you can easily see and I didn't really want that much on the front of my bookmarks. So I'm gonna simply overlap by one stitch and bring it over. Okay, so you can see now I just have that one stitch that really once you clip all your threads, you won't really notice that as much as you might several backstitches. So now that we have all of our layers secured, it's time to do some stitching around our letters. Now, technically right now, everything is secured in place. The inner white fabric is secured in our stitching around the outer edges and all of our layers are together. So if we wanted to leave it like that, we could. But when it comes down to letters like this E we have pieces like this that definitely need to be stitched down. So you wanna think about the letters that you're stitching down when you decide what kind of stitch you wanna use. So in this case, I have a lot of big spaces and big sections that I'm stitching down which is why I could do a large blanket stitch like this. But if we move down to where this E is, you can see that this is a really narrow strip and this blanket stitch might actually be too wide for that section. So in this case with this one, all I'd wanna do is do a nice, simple, straight stitch all the way around the edge. So I'm just gonna start at the top. I'll do a straight stitch around part of the L and then I'll take it off and show you what that looks like. So again, I'm just gonna line my fabric or my needle up. I'm gonna stitch really close to the edge of that white fabric. I still wanna make sure that I'm staying on my fleece. I don't actually want the needle to touch the white fabric at all but I'm just getting very close to it. And I'm going all the way around the edge. And this would also be a spot if you have a thin decorative stitch you wanna use, you could also do that here. You can just keep in mind how much space you have between your letters and on the small sections cut out of your letters that you have to work with when it comes to choosing your stitch. Okay, do you just the top section of our L and again, just like I did when I was going around the perimeter of the bookmark I'm just going to overlap where I started rather than doing another backstitch because this really isn't a stitch that I have to worry about there being any sort of tension or anything on it to where I really need it to be a nice sturdy stitch. I just really want it to stay in place. So a simple overlap is really all I need. So all I would do is continue to do just a straight stitch like that all the way around my letters. If I wanted to maybe add a decorative stitch around the outside edge I could, in this case I added more blanket stitching around the perimeter. I thought it really just kind of tied everything together. And that's something that you could do on this one, too. Maybe if your machine has a lot of preset decorative stitches since we have love, we could do some hearts or something extra stitching around here and really just make a nice personalized bookmark. So the next time you give a book as a gift consider adding your own sort of personal touch to it and including a bookmark with it as well.