making impractical bookmarks + trying to elude despair :)
My first-ever impractical bookmark was made out of that Crayola clay you bake in the oven – I think I made it at a friend’s 10th or 11th birthday party. It was at least a centimeter thick, and the white clay quickly became gray between the pencil-covered pages of my diary. Not a great bookmark!! But here we are again.
Being a high-anxiety person, I can’t say I ever feel truly relaxed. Distracted is usually as close as I get, though I guess you could argue “distracted” and “focused” are kind of the same for me – weird, not gonna dwell on this, call it what you will. Anyway. My passive distraction is watching movies, and my active distraction is making cards, or card-adjacent things. This is why my craft supplies easily make up 25% of my belongings. Oops!!!
So, there are some family birthdays coming up, which is always a great excuse to spend the better part of a Sunday hunched over my desk with paper scraps and watercolors. And a homemade bookmark (paper, not clay lol), I think, is sort of the perfect gift. It doesn’t require a ton of supplies (in fact, I often use leftovers from other projects), it can be highly personalized, and, at the end of the day, if the recipient doesn’t want it, it’s recyclable. It’s small and special. So I set off to make two.
(also, I just needed a few hours of not obsessing over the unmasked, armed insurrection that happened last week in DC, and checking the news on my phone every two minutes, and worrying about future violence and conspiracy theorists and fascism… normal reasons to craft)
For my father-in-law, I wanted to make the church from Epcot’s Norway pavilion – a nod to his Norwegian heritage and to one of his happy places. I decided to stick with the Epcot theme for my sister-in-law as well, choosing the Twinings shop from the UK pavilion because *cute*.
To be honest, making these was the high point of my week. They are over-the-top and arguably too tall to be bookmarks, but I think they’re lovely. AND my anxiety got a few hours to cool off before returning to its usual rolling boil. Win-win.
Thank you for reading! I hope y’all are taking care of yourselves. ❤️
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