Sadly,
the Etsy shop that originally sold these bookmarks no longer exists - I had to scrounge
around Pinterest to find the image. Additionally the user who created the stamp used for these bookmarks is
actually 'on vacation' according to Etsy, so 0 for 2 there. However, the
inspiration lives on!
At
the time of my discovery, I was in my second year of teaching tenth and
eleventh grade English. My school's curriculum included outside-of-class
reading, so my students were all assigned a book each quarter that we discussed
every few weeks, culminating in book analyses (the grading of which were the
bane of my existence!). Anyway, I thought that this would be a great idea for
an end-of-the-year present for my kids, using the apparent favorites of the past
year. Winners for my tenth graders were A
Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and The Lord of the Flies by William Golding; for my eleventh graders
it was F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
I
kept my eye out for the next few weeks and picked up copies of each of these
books from thrift stores and used bookshops. Sure, Amazon would have been
easier, but I'm thrifty like that. ;) I’m also lucky, because my mom is a
stamper, meaning I had a large collection of stamps to look over and choose
from for embellishing the bookmarks. It was fun figuring out an iconic image
for each book from the stamps available – Raisin
was easy because my mom had a sunshine stamp. We also lucked out with LOTF, since she had a conch shell stamp
(how PERFECT is that?). Gatsby and Frankenstein were a bit trickier, but I
finally settled on an artsy portrait stamp that reminded me of the twenties for
Gatsby and a stark outline of a tree
for Frankenstein.
NOTE: These are pictures of leftover bookmarks, which is why I don't have a photo of any Raisin ones - they were all snapped up pretty quickly, as were the Frankenstein ones (only one left!).
My
books’ pages were great – they had the title of the novel centered at the top
of each page, which was a fun detail for the bookmark. I tried to choose pages
that had keywords on them, like character names. Frankenstein was the best – gothic mood words abound in that book –
every page had words like “tortured soul,” “gloom,” “dismal,” “terror,” etc.
Loved it. :P The assembly steps were simple – chop the page down to size, round
the corners (I have a pretty nifty corner rounder punch), add the stamp, laminate, and
trim. I didn’t add the ribbon tassel to my bookmarks – too much hassle, and in
my experience, tasseled bookmarks are the least practical; also, half of these
were for teen boys, so I figured I doubled their odds of survival and potential
use by nixing the tassels!
I did adhere a little note to the back of each
before I laminated them, though. Yes, the majority of my kids were student
athletes. ;) I
laid the bookmarks out on a table in the back of the room and allowed students
to go back and choose their own bookmarks based on their book preference. And
there you have it, sweet, simple, English-y gifts that are easy to
mass-produce, yet unique to each class and student.