Bookmarks

My husband is a scholar, and as such goes through quite a few bookmarks.  He likes to leave them in various books to reference later.  His favorite bookmarks are these woven rug bookmarks (also commonly found at Barnes and Noble and other local bookstores).

He likes the soft ones not just because they're beautiful, but they also never cause damage to the books from being too thick or having sharp edges.  He tends to go through a lot of them, however, and it can get expensive.

I got the idea in my head that I could use pieces of leftover trim that are too short to do anything with to make him some soft bookmarks.

It worked quite well.  I cut bookmark length pieces of scrap trim that I was hanging on to for some unknown reason (honestly, 18" of trim isn't enough to do much with!).  I then sealed the edges with a few drops of Dritz fray check.  This was especially important for the woven trim on top.  That one is a much more complicated weave and is a thicker trim.  Once the fray check dried, I had several nice, soft bookmarks for him, and felt accomplished to have found a use for that useless trim.

I thought I'd share this here because costumers and scribal artists tend to have a reference library, and this is much prettier than using torn pieces of paper to mark your pages; we're all about spreading the pretty!

In retrospect I should probably have pressed the trim first (they were wrapped around cardboard squares for storage), so now they like to curl a bit, but this isn't a problem when pressed inside a book, and you can learn from my mistake.  You're welcome.