Elastic Bookmarks

Elastic bookmarks that have a fun little pencil pouch are the perfect sort of scrap-buster projects if you have just a tiny little bit of fabric left, maybe some elastic. And then you want to make even a last-minute gift maybe for someone who is going back to school or likes to do some journaling. But it's just a bookmark that has a line down the center so you can have a pencil and a pen. Then when you take it off, you can obviously use your notebook. You can put it all the way around your notebook. Or again if you wanna use it as a bookmark rather than one that goes around the entire notebook, say you wanna open up to this page specifically, then you'd go ahead and put it around your notebook and mark it at that page. So it can be a bookmark or go around the entire book. But of course, it holds a pen and a pencil. So super easy to make, and all it requires is a scrap of 2 1/2 inch fabric. So if you have done any kind of project maybe you have used some precut fabrics like a jelly roll. Maybe you've done some placemats or something and you've cut a binding. Anything where you have a strip of 2 1/2 inch fabric left, that is all you need. And of course, if you don't have a scrap, go ahead and just cut one strip with a fabric that's 2 1/2 inches. From that strip of fabric, you just need two pieces, one that is 8 inches and one that is 18 1/2 inches. This of course is going to finish at this height which I just find is a good height for your standard pen or pencil. If you wanna make this bigger or smaller, you can do that, but just know that that's gonna finish, the measurements I'm giving you is going to finish at that size, 18 1/2 and 8 inches. Next, we need to take our long strip here and just do some creative folding. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pinch it right here about the middle, and I'm gonna fold it up. To do that, that way I can bring my lower edge here, my lower raw edge and line it up on the fold. So all I'm doing is creating a fold in the fabric. So I've kind of done a little zigzag, if you will. So if I hold it up this way, maybe you can see easier how I've folded it. All I've done is I've pinched it, and then I brought it up, and I've aligned my lower raw edge with the fold. Now here's where you can do a little bit of adjusting as to how far up you want your little pencil holder pocket to be. So if this is your pencil, you can bring it in here. You can see maybe that will be a little bit too high. So just go ahead and adjust your folds down. Wherever your lower fold is is where you want your lower raw edge to be. And now you can bring in your pencil and see if that's a better height. So put your fold wherever you want it to be. This one here just for reference is about 5 1/4 inches up from the lower edge. Once you have your fold in place, go ahead and either press it with your iron, use your fingers to just finger press so that stays put. And now go ahead and put your two pieces together. So here I have my two pieces and I am going to line them up right sides together. And I cut my one strip at eight inches 'cause I know that is going to be plenty long enough to cover up my piece that I folded. But you will notice that it is slightly longer than my folded piece when I flip this over. And I wanted it to be long enough that it would cover it. But now once I have my folded piece where I want it, go ahead and just trim down that eight-inch piece to whatever size your folded piece is so you have nice straight edges. Now we are going to bring in our elastic. So of course this is an elastic bookmark. We need a way to secure this to our notebook. And I did that using just sort of standard elastic. So if I bring in my finished one here, you can see I have it going from the top of my pencil holder bookmark to the bottom, and I have enough to go around my entire notebook. So if you don't know what notebook maybe somebody is going to use this on, if you're giving it as a gift, a good rule of thumb when you're cutting your elastic is to go about an inch or two longer than your actual piece of fabric is. So you can see here it's about an inch longer, but of course that's doubled under; it's folded. So I would go about two inches longer. That's gonna give you enough to be able to go hopefully around any notebook that they're going to use and still give you enough to be able to poke those ends into your actual bookmark and keep it closed. If you actually have the notebook, you can take your elastic, run it down the length of your notebook here, and then give yourself about 1/2 inch on the top and 1/2 inch on the bottom so that you can tuck it into your bookmark that you're sewing here. So use your notebook if you have it. Otherwise just go two inches longer than your fabric. So with this elastic, it is a little over 1/2 of an inch. So when I stitch my pieces together, I wanna leave an opening that is a little over 1/2 of an inch on the top and the bottom so I can stick my elastic into it once I have it stitched. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start just a little ways in from my corner, come to the corner, stitch down. Go over just a few stitches. I'm gonna stop, leave an opening, and then do the same thing on the other side. I'm gonna go ahead and stitch this using a 1/4 inch seam allowance. You can use a larger seam allowance if you want, but I find on a small project like this, I'm just going to end up trimming that seam allowance away anyways. So I might as well just stitch it smaller to start with. At the corners, you're gonna go ahead and pivot. Stitch down the long side. Go ahead and remove your pins as you get to them. At the next corner, stop with your needle down. Pivot, whoops, put my needle down, raise my presser foot up so I can pivot around, and I wanna go just a couple stitches. So I'm gonna go two or three stitches. I'm gonna go ahead and raise my needle up, raise my presser foot and just move over. So rather than having to clip those threads and start a whole new line of stitching, I'm just going to move a little bit. Then continue onto my next side, and with that needle down pivot and do the next side. Get to the corner, needle down. Oh, right, like so, pivot, and do a couple of stitches. Go ahead and clip my threads here. Now at the lower edge here, this is where I just did my little travel. So this isn't actually stitched, but I can go ahead and just come in here and clip those threads. I wanna clip all of my corners, right, like, so, so I don't have any bulk there when I go to turn it right side out. Go ahead and clip this one here and here. And now I can turn this right side out. So it's a fairly small thin project. So it's gonna be a little bit more difficult to turn right side out than a bigger project, obviously. But if you need to use a turning tool, you can use that. So a chopstick works. The pen or pencil that you were using as your reference guide as to how tall to make this, that will work to help push this out. But as long as you give yourself about an inch opening or an inch gap on either side, you should be able to just push this through and easily turn it right side out. I'll get this poked out here. Then I'll go ahead and use my snips to push out the corners. So you have four corners to poke out. There's one. There's two. Come up here to the upper edge where you're gonna do the same thing up here, pushing out those corners like so. And then you can either take it over to your pressing mat and give it a press or just use your fingers to press it flat because we need to do one more, a little bit of stitching and then you can give the whole thing a final press if you want. So obviously we need to add in our elastic. So I haven't cut my elastic yet. So I'm gonna go ahead and cut my elastic, again about two inches longer than my piece of fabric ended up being. So I'll go ahead and clip that there. And now all you need to do is fold under the turning opening. So we're at 1/4 of an inch. Go ahead and fold that in towards the wrong side. Insert your elastic into that turning opening. Center your elastic. Push it in by about 1/4 to 1/2 of an inch. Go ahead and put a pin in. And then we're gonna stitch right across that elastic. So you're essentially top stitching because you want to secure that turning opening close. So we're stitching about an eighth of an inch away from the edge. And I wanna go ahead and stitch along the entire length of the bottom. I'm gonna stitch forward. And then I'm actually gonna go ahead and stitch backwards along the entire length as well. So if you don't think you can stitch backwards along that same line of stitching and have it line up, then rather than stitching forwards one and then backward one, you can go ahead and just take it off your machine and stitch just two lines of stitching. But two lines of stitching is gonna make it nice and secure so when you are actually pulling on this elastic to put it around your notebook, it's not gonna pull out. Do the same thing on the upper edge. So you're gonna go ahead and fold under that 1/4 inch. Bring your elastic around. Make sure that it's not twisted at all. You wanna make sure it's laying flat. Bring it up and around. Insert it into that turning opening, again by about 1/4 to 1/2 of an inch. And then you would just take this over to your machine and stitch it the exact same way, so two lines of straight stitching right across the top. Once you've stitched it, give it a nice press. And then you have this fun little bookmark that can hold your pens and pencils. Now I have put an extra line of stitching down the center 'cause I wanted to be able to hold one pen and one pencil. If you wanna do that, once you have stitched this entire thing, you can go ahead and just stitch a straight line of stitching right down the center. And that kinda gives you that little bit of division. One last thing I wanna point out is that if you're looking at this and you're thinking, okay, I really like the top part. I like the fabric that's holding, you know, your pens and pencils, but the elastic is kind of boring, you can actually get fun, fancy elastics. So here's just a couple examples of some fun elastic that kind of matched with the fabric I have here. One is this braided elastic that has some really fun details in here, some little zigzag lines going across. Or you can even find metallic elastic. So yes, there's plastic over it, but it is still even shiny without the plastic. So it's actually soft. It's not... sometimes when you think of metallic, you think it's rough or something like that, but it's actually nice soft elastic. So there's a metallic elastic as an option. So you can use pretty much any kind of elastic you want. And there is lots of fun, different colors and textures and types of elastic that you can use for this fun elastic bookmark project.