For the 2025 Holiday season I decided to follow the theme of Reading for my gift giving. I want to share my love for art and information services in the form of homemade bookmarks from my personal Book Worm Home Library. These gifts were hand delivered and mailed to loved ones across British Columbia and Alberta.
The bookmarks and envelopes are decorated with four different hand carved Linoleum stamps (all of which took a total of six hours to carve), and one premade date stamp that I used the numbers from.
The rest of the labour from cutting the paper, doing five rounds of prints including individually numbering the slides, arranging real negative pieces (from a failed batch of film I developed in a dark room in 2022) to represent a book, laminating, and finally cutting the bookmarks to size took about thirty hours in total. A lot of this time was used experimentally, but averages to about thirty minutes of labour per bookmark.
The numbering on the negative slides mimics the identification found on real film, and also represents the tradition of assigning “editions” to the total works produced within a set of prints. I made seventy-two of these bookmarks equaling two-hundred-eighty-eight numbered slides. The edition of your bookmark signifies what order in the project each bookmark was produced, spotlighting the labour intensive and limited nature behind fine art production.
The stamps were carved from Speedball Speedy Cut and Green Easy Cut Linoleum blocks using a Speedball Linoleum Cutter, and printed onto Stonehenge paper using a Veltec Ink Pad, where the finished bookmarks were sent through my Queceuy Laminator using Scotch Thermal Laminating Sheets.
For as many people as I could I also selected a hardcover “Coffee Table Book” from The Creative Bookworm Book Store in Langley, catered to each individuals areas of interest with the intention to help summon creative inspiration. Please share and use these bookmarks to give yourself and loved ones the gift of getting into a good book this holiday season!