Valentine bookmarks for a swap

When I offered this bookmark swap, I was extremely excited about it. I started early and had a plan. I made the backgrounds from two thicknesses of cardboard, old book pages, and gesso. I was going for a white to cream background, and pale pink hearts. I even made some shrink plastic hearts that I was going to string on the fibers.

Then I realized that I might as well have decorated a brick!! These bookmarks were too thick to go in a book and my motivation to start over was at a low.

I finally talked myself into starting again, this time using a hanging file folder as the substrate. It took me over two weeks to finish these, because at each step, I would procrastinate, attempt a different design, get discouraged, or change my mind in mid stream. I now have about 20 ugly bookmarks and a few that I'm finally satisfied with enough to trade.
So you don't have to stand on your head to view these, I scanned both ends. The idea is to place the bookmark in the book at the line on the page where you stopped. You flip the bookmark for either the left page or the right page of the book and insert.

The folders were red on one side and pink on the other. I glued napkins on the pink side, cut some hearts from pages I gessoed and added red fluid acrylic to, stamped the images (yep, I stamped these using Staz-On), and added the arrow using my red Zig pen, which had a tendency to bleed into the napkin. For the back, I used a white glitter pen to write my name, e-mail address, and the swap date in the shape of flower stems. I punched flowers and a small heart from various papers left over from my Da Vinci collages.

The hardest part was trying to get the fibers to stick to the bookmarks without punching a hole. I used practically every glue, adhesive, and trick I had in my supplies. I finally got them to stick using "Ultimate," but it made the fibers stiff. A trade-off I wasn't very happy about, but one I have to live with, since we swap tomorrow. It's a good thing I'm the host and they don't have far to travel!!