St. Patrick’s Day is right around the corner, and I’m LUCKY enough to have a sister-in-law who is very talented in the crafts department. She is the bookmark queen at my niece and nephew’s elementary school, and has agreed to share the adorable bookmark craft she put together for Andy’s class. When I was teaching, I LOVED doing crafts with my kiddos, but often spent a lot of time creating ideas and gathering materials for them. It would have been great to have someone like Carla who could just do it all for me!
Here’s a picture of Carla, my brother Zack, Andy, Sadie, and Gordie from Christmas.
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Hi everyone. My name is Carla and I’m addicted to crafting. There, I said it! And it felt so good. I’ve always been into Pinterest-y type things, even before Pinterest was invented. So when my oldest son’s second grade teacher asked for volunteers to come up with projects for the class Halloween party last year, of course I was first in line. Feeling underwhelmed after an exhaustive online search for creative classroom project ideas, I decided to come up with my own. And so began my newest crafting addiction…bookmarks!
Like Molly, I love to read (or at least I used to before I became a full-time working mother of three with a cookie business on the side. I have plans this summer to get back to reading as a priority for myself so we’ll see how that goes!). Anyway, I love to read, my husband loves to read and now so do my kids. My oldest two kids are now into chapter books so I thought the bookmarks would be a perfect way for them to have something fun and silly that they can make themselves to mark their pages. I enjoy making them myself, but I try to keep kids in mind when creating the bookmarks because that’s who’ll really be putting them together, right? Right. I keep telling myself this anyway. I have a bit of a control problem so when my kids are doing a craft, it’s so hard for me to not jump in and do it for them. I’m working on it though, I swear.
My most recent bookmark creation is for St. Patrick’s Day – it’s a pot o’ gold at the end of a rainbow. I also had intentions of creating a leprechaun, but I haven’t quite gotten around to it yet and it’s not looking like it’ll happen so I’ll have to save that idea for next year! So here are some step-by-step instructions on how I put the pot o’ gold bookmark together.
Things you’ll need:
- Cardstock in rainbow colors (I found shimmery cardstock in all of these colors – except orange – and I thought it added to the magic of the St. Patrick’s Day theme! But seriously, who took all the shimmery orange paper?!?!)
- Cardstock in black
- Something gold and round to use as gold coins – I used oversized sequins I found at the craft store, but really you can use anything that strikes your fancy here
- Glue
- Scissors
- Optional: Paper cutter (it cuts perfectly straight strips for the rainbow so if you have one great, but it’s certainly not necessary)
How to assemble:
- Excluding red, cut each rainbow color into strips between ¼” – ½” wide and 6” long.
- The red cardstock will be used as your base to glue the other colors onto so you’ll need to cut the red to about 2-2 ¼” wide and 6” long.
3. Glue the colored strips into rainbow color order from left to right onto the red strip, leaving the same ¼”- ½” space for the red to start off the rainbow.
4. Draw a template of a pot of gold onto the black cardstock and cut it out. If you’re going to mass produce these bookmarks for a group of kids to put together, be sure to trace your best template so that you don’t have to spend lots of time trying to draw the perfect pot of gold. The one I ended up using was approximately 3” wide at the widest part of the bottom and just shy of 3” tall. You can see here it was a little bit of trial and error as to which size would work best to cover the bottom of the rainbow.
5. With the back side of your pot of gold template facing up, glue whatever you use as gold coins to the back of the top of the pot so that the coins are sticking out over the top when you flip it over to the front. My daughter says I didn’t put the coins high enough and I’ll soon be working on how to add a few more layers of sequins per her request after the fact. They don’t always make it easy to do something fun, do they?
6. To finish it off, simply glue your pot of gold to the bottom of the rainbow and voila! A quick and easy holiday themed bookmark for your child (or you) to enjoy!
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Thanks for sharing, Carla!!
And for those of you who think EVERY post should have a picture of Lucy in it, here’s a picture showing that she’s more interested in laundry than crafting at this point. If she could crawl, I’d make her crawl each item to the washer! 😉
XOXO
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