There are thousands of different options you can choose from to make wonderful gifts for your friends and family, or in case you want to make a living with a small business.
And you can use your Cricut to make this task easier and faster, especially when making lots of them! Today, we bring you a nice present for those who still like reading physical books: bookmarks! But not any.
With Cricut, you can make beautiful wooden bookmarks!
What do you need?
This type of work takes some more materials than making regular stickers or vinyl decals, which only require a piece of vinyl to cut, some transfer tape and a cutting mat.
For making Cricut bookmarks, you will need:
- Veneer wood
- Painter’s tape
- An extra sticky cutting mat (the purple one)
- Super glue
- Baby wipes or a moist cloth
- A craft knife
- A weaver
- A rolling pin
- A Cricut Deep Point Blade in your Cricut cutting machine
Although they may look like a lot of materials, you probably have most of them if you are a usual crafter. Besides that, you’ll need a design for your Cricut bookmark projects.
You can create your own on the Design Space app or find pre-made designs from crafters on the internet. For sure you will find one that suits your likes!
How to make veneer wooden bookmarks?
The first thing you need to do is insert the design in your Design Space app and decide upon the size and the drawings or patterns you want it to have.
Make sure that the bookmark is big enough to fit a regular book. No problem if it is too small, but it shouldn’t be too big for it to be visible with a closed book.
If you want to include some text in the design of your wood bookmarks, remember to use fonts that are quite thick. Your writing will probably turn out hard to see if the font is too thin.
You can have a base shape for the bookmark itself, but you can use any other figure you like to include some visual element. Again, always remember to choose drawings with not such thin strokes.
We recommend repeating the same designs on different sheets of veneer. You will later see why.
Cutting the wood bookmark
The best kind of wood you can use for this kind of project is veneer wood, as it is thin but resistant enough. You could also use balsa wood If you like, but remember to never use plywood.
This might be the easiest-to-get option, but the outcome won’t be so pleasing. Considering it’s made of several layers of veneer wood, the reaction each of these layers has to cut can be different, and turn out into a not so nice result.
As we said before, wood is a little bit more difficult to manage than other materials, as it is thicker and stronger. That’s why you need to use a specific kind of blade for this kind of work.
Make sure you are using a Deep Point Blade, which can cut through this type of material easily without wearing off. However, that’s not the only thing you need to keep in mind.
When you have finished preparing your design and the software is ready for cutting, You will need to toggle some settings before starting.
First, choose the material.
You will find “natural veneer wood” among the options in the software, and you will also need to increase the pressure of your Cricut maker on the material. Besides, program the Cricut to perform at least 4 passes.
That way, the blade will pass through the same line several times and ensure cutting. Once that’s done, you need to prepare the material on the cutting mat.
How to prepare the wood for cutting your Cricut bookmark?
Considering wood is stronger than other materials, it will show some resistance to cutting. This can cause the wooden sheet to move on the cutting mat when the blade passes through it several times. Here are some tips to avoid that.
- We recommend using the purple Cricut cutting mat. It’s extra sticky to ensure a strong grip;
- Apply strips of painter’s tape on the borders of the sheet to secure it in place even more certainly. Always remember to align the tape with the borders of the cutting mat. If any tape escapes the mat, it could cause a jam;
- Use the rolling pin on top of everything to apply some pressure on the material.
With these three tips, you can make sure nothing moves out of place.
Let’s get cutting!
If you followed all the steps above, there shouldn’t be any issues while cutting. However, we recommend taking a look at the process in case there are any jams, any movement of the cutting mat or any pieces of wood peeling off the mat.
This cutting process will take longer than others, as the blade will slide along the surface several times.
Once the cutting is finished, carefully peel the wooden bookmarks off the cutting mat.
Be careful not to break them, as they are quite fragile and they will surely be really well attached to the mat, considering the previous steps we took.
Now it’s time for using the weaver, the craft knife and, if needed, a file. These three tools are used for providing neat borders in case there are any splinters or unclean cuts.
These don’t usually occur with other materials, but wooden bookmarks can have these kinds of details.
The final step is sticking some of the pieces together.
You can either combine different tones, colors and designs, or you can simply stick two equal bookmarks together, but we highly recommend using a double layer of wood as only one might not be so resistant to last through time.
We have finished!
We hope you can use these tips to create the most wonderful wooden bookmarks, whether simple or intricate, with your Cricut cutter.
You can make them for the graduated ones too. Also if you click here you can find some interesting Cricut graduation ideas.
Happy crafts! 🙂