My (almost!) 5 year old daughter and I have been having a lot of fun braiding up a storm over the past few weeks. After we made princess braids, we designed a couple of fairy braid hair clips and this week we’ve created some braided bookmarks.

We’re slowly moving on from the big print picture books and she has started to show an interest in ‘bigger’ books. Which of course calls for a bookmark and we insisted on making our own.

Let me show you what we came up with!

How to make your own Braided Bookmarks

It was my daughter who came up with the idea of making a bookmark that would close around the book to avoid losing it easily.

With that idea in mind we gathered some materials and started to tinker …

I think it’s a great idea to set out an invitation to create when you start working on a project. I always get crazy excited when I see all those inviting loose parts. It’s nice to have options and the freedom to just start somewhere and see where your inspiration leads you.

This time we ended up making something simple, pretty and useful!

Here’s what we did:

Miss ‘Almost 5’ chose the colours and we decided to start by making a little braid. We used about 5 strands of embroidery floss the length of a (long) arm. I folded it double and made a knot on top as you can see on the image above.

Then I simply braided until the end and made another knot so it ends up looking like the braid in the image above.

Since the goal was to make a bookmark that could close around the book, we decided that the easiest way would be to stitch a button on top of the knot.

To make this braided bookmark easy to use for little hands, I tied the loose strings in the loop together using the knot as shown in the image above. You don’t have to go all the way around, the main goal is to keep the loose loops together so it’s easy to slide over the button.

And when finished, it looks a bit like this! I think it’s adorable. (And how I love the Peter Rabbit story!)

Depending on whether your child would like a bookmark for a specific favourite book or a more general one, you can measure just how long you want the braid to be. We ended up making a few bookmarks in different colours and different sizes thinking they would cover a variety of book sizes.

Later on we did make one specifically for our big fairy tale book. It matches the book cover and look really cute.

Having Fun Getting Creative

Sitting down to potter around in my Little Worlds studio with my daughter is one of my favourite things to do. What a pleasure it is that she shares my love for creating things.

When making something, the joy for me is often in the process: I love coming up with an idea and figuring out how to turn in into a real tangible object, solving all kinds of small and big problems along the way.

With the same invitation to create we could easily come up with ten different kinds of bookmarks. And I encourage you to get creative: add some beads, make a tassle, use more or less embroidery floss, have fun with different colours, combinations, functionalities and so on.

It’s all about having fun!

And if you enjoy projects like these braided bookmarks I think you’ll also like our rainbow necklace, seashell mobile and fairy hair braids.

Should you be looking for more inspiration for mommy projects or diy toys, be sure to have a look on Pinterest here and here.

Thanks so much for visiting today!

Ann*

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