Crafty Author – Book Charm Bookmarks

If you made your pile of gorgeous, little book charms using my previous instructions, then you probably want some ideas about what to do with them. Or maybe not, but I’ll give you a few anyway. 🙂 The first one is the easiest to do: Bookmarks!

Average time to assemble two dozen bookmarks is about an hour once you’re proficient at it. The first time I put these together, it took about 2 hours simply because I had to work it out as I went along. Once you’re really good at it, it might be super fast.

Super Short Instructions:

• – Get some bookmark blanks, eyepins or headpins, beads or charms and your book charms
• – Assemble
• – Admire!

Now for the longer instructions with some pictures!

Supplies:

• – Bookmark blanks – Here is where I diverge from my normal Amazon route. You can find them there, but they tend to be more expensive for some reason. Also, the decorative ones that seem like a good deal are often made of a more brittle material and can’t be bent at all. They actually break. I did buy a couple of orders of some that looked really beautiful. Out of two dozen marks, 9 were bent and 6 were broken at the link where the charms get hung. And when I tried to straighten a bent one, it broke. So, I’d stay away from those. The best pricing I’ve found, as well as quality, is at Fire Mountain Gems for the silver-plated steel ones. They are really nice!
• – Findings such as eyepins and headpins, depending on how you’ll put them together, plus possibly jumprings and crimp tubes.
• – Tools for creating the loops. You can get these from Amazon and I use these and these. I love them! You’ll also need a crimping tool if you’re using crimps. There are loads of different ones, but just search on Fire Mountain Gems and you’ll find some very reasonably priced ones that are super useful. I have two from there.
• – Beads, stones or charms, depending on how you want to decorate them.
• – Your bookcharms

Instructions:

• – Since you baked your bookcharms with either a headpin or an eyepin already inside, you should already have an idea of what you can do or want to do. If you have an eyepin, (with the eye at the bottom of the book), then you can hang a charm from that using a jumpring to connect them (examples of that are to the right of the row of bookmarks in the top picture). If you have a headpin, then you can loop the top of your headpin around the hole in the bookmark and then crimp it using a crimping tube and be done with it. If you want more embellishments, you have options. For headpin bookcharms, I usually add another headpin to a jumpring inserted into the bookmark hole and put meaningful beads and/or charms onto it (you can see an example of that toward the left of my top picture, the one with the alabaster bead). That way, you’ll have two pins dangling from the bookmark.
• – First, learn to open and close a jumpring properly. Here’s a good youtube video.
• – You can learn the basics of wrapping wire, crimping, and other very simple procedures in a minute or two right here. If I could learn it in a minute, you know it’s simple.
• – Assembly line. The way I do it is to lay out all the parts for each one and then I don’t have to put everything down and fiddle with stuff. It does make it go faster. First, attach anything you want to the bookcharm (if you have eyepin opening), then make any additional pins (like with beads and such), and finally, only after you’re done with all of that, make the loops in the top of the pins and crimp them. Then, open your jumpring and attach the looped pins to the opening in the bookmark.
• – That’s it. Admire it.

Notes on choosing embellishments. I try to choose things that match something significant in the book. For Strikers, that includes charms like two hearts, a sailboat wheel, a sailboat, leaves, etc. For the book, The In-Betweener, I chose things like padlocks, keys, birds, hearts, infinity signs, and so on. For the sequel to that, Forever Between, I chose bicycles, hearts, infinity, birds, arrows, crossbows, etc. Each book has it’s moments and themes, and there are a bagillion charms out there to choose from.

For beads, I like to use semi-precious stones if I can find the right ones, but glass (particularly some of the elaborate designs) are good as well when the color matters more than the substance. So, alabaster, jade, malachite, lapis lazuli, fresh water pearls, obsidian, and even gray marble have their places on the book charms. Most everything I get from Fire Mountain Gems, but some things I can only find by dedicating searching. A few things, like infinity charms and crossbows, I had to go through Amazon. That tends to cost more.

As always, if you have troubles or questions, don’t hesitate to email me or comment! This is a fun project that is great for giveaways or simply to send to your most avid readers.