This Christmas, I prepared something special for my book club friends — bookmarks!

Bookmarks are always a big hit over at Flips Flipping Pages. We have bookmarks for every book discussion we have every month, and we like to give out bookmarks on special occasions, too — we all never seem to have enough of them!

Last year, at the 2009 FFP Christmas party, I set up a bookmark station with leather thongs and charms at our Christmas party so people could make their own bookmarks, but this year, I wanted to try out something different.

Last week, National Book Store launched Work Station, a specially dedicated section of NBS that caters to office supplies — from stationery to computers, safes, printers, scanners, filing cabinets, office furniture, and even Apple products (Glorietta 5 branch, but you can order them  at the other Work Station branches in NBS SM Calamba and SM San Pablo, and the stand alone stores in Market! Market! and Glorietta 3. I was invited to the launch (unfortunately I had work that day), but  I was way ahead of them — I had raided Work Station several weeks earlier for supplies.

Ok, I have to warn you this will sound uber office geek, but I got myself a laminating machine, a paper cutter, some laminating film, Bostik glue,  scotch tape, and a wodge of other supplies I don’t really need (I love supplies!) but I can never have enough of — post its, Dong-A Play-on Markers (my current favorite brand of pens), oh, and how can I forget — gauge 5 plastic cover!

I had a foreign language edition (German?) of The Adventures of Tintin: The Shooting Star that I foraged in a bargain bin eons ago for some loose change, and I don’t know why I bought it at the time, but this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to put it to use.

I cut the strips, which wasn’t so hard because I found that the strips line up almost perfectly back to front.

Laid them out on the laminating film:

Fed the laminator:

Then I cut the sheets into bookmarks:

Trimmed the corners, punched holes, threaded leather thongs, and stuffed them into envelopes made from pages of a manga directory. And voila!

The bookmarks are pretty sturdy, and waterproof too! Now more people want them and I’m out of comics, hahaha! I draw the line at using English Tintin so I will have to find something else to make bookmarks out of :D

Hint, hint: