Read it! Read it!

One of the things that I am most proud of my kids is their love for reading. All three of my girls are avid readers and they find every excuse to read a book. When I saw the reading frog/toad in the Toad-ally School Cut It set, I knew that I had to cut a bookmark (or 3) for them.

I wanted to make a "paperclip-style" type of bookmark but I had to figure out how to make the clip part. The Thin Paths tool is a new feature in the latest Make-the-Cut v.3.3.3 and I thought that it would be easy to just use that tool on a letter U to make a single cutting line. I was wrong. I used a letter U from the Arial font and even though the tool made it into a single path, the cut line was all crooked. I spent some time trying to fix that but gave up in the end. Instead, I managed to make the "clip" by using Thin Paths on a rectangle and a single line curve that I imported from the Basic Shapes box (Misc) in MTC. 

Once I got that down, constructing the rest of the bookmark was easy, I made the base by welding a copy of the base layer of the frog to a rectangle. 

 

Since this bookmark has a big and relatively heavy top, I reinforced the base by cutting two layers of the bottom-most layer (the layer with the "paperclip" cut) and gluing them together. 

Next, I cut out all the layers of the frog and adhered them together and onto the base to complete the project.

You may notice that I modified the layer on the spine of the frog's book.  I had cut out the original, unmodified layer on vinyl because of how intricate it is. Even though it turned out beautifully, I decided that I prefer the look of a printed spine as against a vinyl-cut one. I printed "READ ME" using the LD Chaplin font and thought that it turned out super cute. The following picture shows how the original cut-out layer (red vinyl) looks like with the modified and printed one (grey cardstock):

This idea can easily be used with any other shapes too. Just make a copy of the bottom-most layer of the main image and weld that to a rectangle. Next, join the "paperclip" cut lines to that welded layer and you will have the base of the bookmark!

 

My kids are always losing their bookmarks and I am so happy at how big these are. The frogs were imported into Make-the-Cut at 72 DPI and I did not change the size at all. They look so cool when they are inside the book! I can't wait for the girls to use these bookmarks so I can say, "EEK! There's a giant frog on your book!"

Edit (Sep 15): Download the MTC file for the Bookmark Clip here: Bookmark Clip
If you would like to share the file, please link back to this page so your friends can download it from here. Thanks.