It’s back-to-school for the lit­tle ones and for us that means a lot of read­ing! The kids have read­ing charts that have to be filled with 20 min­utes of read­ing every day.

As big book lovers, this comes as no chore for us. But to make things even more fun, we decided to cre­ate a cou­ple of fun lac­ing book­marks to accom­pany our daily ready routine.

We started by gath­er­ing fiber board from old cereal or cracker boxes and fun, bright con­trast­ing embroi­dery thread. I cre­ated a tem­plate for a geo­met­ric heart and paper air­plane design, which you can down­load for your own use here.

After print­ing and cut­ting out the tem­plates, I punched holes in the points of the design where all the strings would need to lace through. I used a 1/16″ hole punch, but a 1/8″ would work as well. And if you don’t have either one of these, you could just use the point of a nail and tap into a bit to cre­ate the holes.

I then used a marker to mark the holes so that it went onto the fiber board. Next, I removed the tem­plate and punched holes in the fiber board where the marker points were located. You can have your lit­tle ones help with this part–they’ll love it!

We then threaded a blunt uphol­stery nee­dle with embroi­dery floss and began lac­ing through the holes, mak­ing sure to fol­low the design from the tem­plate. When the design was com­plete, we tightly tied things off in the back.

Lit­tle O (3.5 yrs) had a lot of fun with the lac­ing stage on his paper air­plane design. And with a lit­tle help and direc­tion, he did almost all of the lac­ing himself.

Once our book­marks were com­plete, we couldn’t wait to sit down to a lit­tle story time with Big Rabbit’s Bad Mood (a favorite around here). One of my favorite aspects of the paper air­plane lac­ing design is that if you turn it length wise, it cre­ates the per­fect fol­low along marker for early readers.

The geo­met­ric heart design is per­fect for the older kids. Not only does it work well pop­ping up out of a mid­dle grade/young adult novel, such as Girl’s Best Friend from the Mag­gie Brook­lyn Series, but an older child at this read­ing level could most likely do the entire lac­ing book­mark craft on their own. Perfect!

Meet The Contributor

Mer­rilee Lid­di­ard (aka Mer Mag) is an illus­tra­tor, crafter, and mother of two boys and a wee lit­tle girl.

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