I did a little experimenting with today’s Felt Fun Friday post. I found these felt bookmarks and thought it would be fun to personalize them. Of course I could cut my own, but these came in assorted colors in a package of 16, so I figured I’d give it a shot and report back to you.

Cute, right?

Of course you could cut other felt pieces to decorate, but this is also a perfect opportunity for those of you with cutting machines, whether you have an actual vinyl cutter, or a Cricut or Silhouette machine. Grab your scraps of heat transfer vinyl (you DO save all your scraps so your work space looks like an episode of Hoarders…It’s not just me, right?!)

Make your cute little design or quote. DON’T FORGET TO FLIP THE DESIGN IN REVERSE BEFORE CUTTING!! (Yeah, I’ve forgotten to do that once or twice.)

Weed the vinyl, lay onto the bookmark, press and remove. Easy peasy, right? Well, not exactly. Take a look…

The bookmark with the strips must be painted or something because the coloring sort of melted. :-/ Then on the bottom photo the felt was sort of, um, warped I guess is the best word I can come up with to describe it. And it smelled like burnt plastic.

This is when I realize they must be made of some different kind of felt than I normally use because this has never happened before. But I kept experimenting. I decided not to use the painted/striped felt if I was going to heat press it. So I cut a new iron-on decal and pressed it on one of the solid colored felt bookmarks.

I’m sure the majority of you use a standard household iron, and while I do use that sometimes, I often will use my commercial heat press since it’s already turned on. Either way, if you’ve ever worked with heat press vinyl and different materials it usually takes some testing to find the right temperature, pressure, and length of press time. I found that I did not need to press very long, which worked great so I didn’t melt/warp the bookmarks. The other key is to let the piece cool before peeling…sometimes the vinyl peels better hot, sometimes warm, sometimes cool. This application worked best once it had cooled off a bit.

So I kept experimenting. I had these little reject iron-on logos I made awhile back. They were rejects because do you see that little tiny bit at the bottom of them? Yeah, that drove me nuts. I didn’t cut them in complete circles. But as we all know I hate throwing anything away when I might find SOME use for it someday. Today was the day.

I put them on the backs of the bookmarks, pressed for a few seconds and voila! It worked great!

I had been using ribbon to tie to the bookmarks but I thought the bookmark that has the really pretty sparkly pink lettering needed a little something different, so I made a quick yarn pom pom and tied it to another piece of yarn tied to the bookmark.

Making a yarn pom pom is very easy…wrap it around your three fingers many many times, slide it off, tie a knot around the middle, snip the loops on each side, fluff and trim.

I love it!

So here are my finished bookmarks:

I REALLY loved using the sparkle vinyl. I only have some small pieces of that on hand because I never know what to make with it, but I love it so much!

This was the second “Oscar” bookmark I made…the first was one of the melted/warped ones because I had iron-on adhesive on the back of the purple layer and I pressed it too long. The second time I heat pressed the white lettering to the purple layer, then hot glued it to the bookmark.

It really wouldn’t take long to cut your own bookmarks, these were approximately 2″ x 6″. But, if you want to buy a packages of pre-cut bookmarks I would highly recommend using felt or hot glue to decorate these as opposed to using iron-on adhesive, it just wasn’t working so well with this application. Or you could sew or embroider design on them…so many options, really!

So what do you think? What would your bookmark say? How would you decorate it?