EGA Bookmark Challenge

At last night’s meeting I presented a program from EGA Outreach 2010: the Stitching for Literacy bookmark Challenge. The EGA's program outline is on the right on this page. The challenge is aimed at creating bookmarks for a local school or library for Children’s Book Week in early May. I am hoping to hear back soon from the Munster Public Library about our partnering with them for this.

Time is tight. Please bring completed bookmarks to the May meeting. I plan to bring my camera to photograph the bookmarks to be entered for the prizes. Please spread the word.

As an ongoing outreach, I will continue collecting bookmarks for the local program Hammond Reads. They are a local literacy program and one of their activities is to collect and give books to children. Their main event is in the fall, a program called Time Out for Reading. We hope to have a good amount of bookmarks to give to them for this event. (and if you have any books you wish to donate, they would be welcome, too!)

I learned about this program late in the day yesterday and was only half-prepared for the meeting. Here are some bookmark guidelines and suggestions.


Traditional rectangular bookmarks can be almost any size—as long as it fits in a book. Embroidery designs should be fairly flat—no stumpwork or dimensional stitches unless they are on the part that sticks out of the book. A “standard” size I found online is 2-1/4” x 7-1/2”. The bookmark my library hands out are 2” x 6”

You may stitch the entire length of a bookmark or just stitch a small area and attach it to a backing. Bookmarks may be backed with self-fabric, ribbon, felt, or cardboard.

Wee Folk Art provides patterns for a cute felt mouse bookmark and a Koala bookmark—the tails are the actual book marks. I'm sure this idea can be adapted for other motifs.

If you scroll down a bit on the Bookmark Collector’s page there are links to several bookmark patterns.

There are also corner bookmarks. Here’s a tutorial for a cross stitch corner book mark on Feeling Stitchy.

At the meeting, someone asked about plastic sleeves for bookmarks. I found them online. The site also offers reasonably priced kits for paper bookmarks with sleeves. If we want to do this as an ongoing project, we could perhaps stitch sample designs to fit the bookmark size, scan them, and print bookmarks of our designs (with our chapter info printed on the back).