Cheap and Easy Gifts to Make: Bookplates

In the midst of my holiday crafting, I stumbled upon an oft-overlooked cheap and easy gift to make -- bookplates. Do you have lots of friends who like to read? (If not, maybe you need to get some new smarter friends, eh?)

Show their books some love with these expensive-looking, but simple to make bookplates. I did a search for free bookplate templates and found lots of options that suited my style (and those of my gift recipients).

Here's what you'll need:

• Some nice heavier paper (I used some gold-ish resume paper that I stole from my husband's desk, and some 32lb white resume paper that I had) - something with some color or texture could be cool, especially with the black and white designs
• A printer
• Paper cutting device -- a rotary trimmer is nice/faster, but I just used a razor and straight edge and it was fine (Double Bonus: cutting yourself during this project adds a marbled effect to the paper and improves curses!)
• Cutting board

TIP: I found it easier to save everything as images (rather than PDFs) and put them in a PowerPoint. I tiled the images, so each sheet had 6-9 bookplates. This made printing much easier and allowed me to control the size of each bookplate.

Here are some of my favorite solid-colored bookplates. These would look great on colorful paper or on plain paper with a bright ink:

• Three AWESOME bookplates (I LOVE THESE!)
• Adorable girl with a book and elves bookplate
• Cat reading a book bookplate
• Block text "Love" bookplate

(I actually just thought of that plain paper/bright ink thing while I was typing this up and am tempted to go make more just so I can use some fuchsia ink.)

Here are some of my favorite multicolored/patterned bookplates. These look best on neutral paper:

• Dog eating a book bookplate
• Four bookplates - owl, branch, colorful
• Bright patterned bookplates (Remind me a bit of Vera Bradley)
• Three bookplates from Martha Stewart (I cropped each of these way down and tiled them, because the way they are laid out on the page here is a major waste of paper! Tsk tsk!)
• Bright text bookplates (Yes, this is a link from the other section, but it goes in both.)
• Animal silhouettes for children and adult bookplates

Print them out, cut them apart and you are almost ready to gift! I had some envelopes that I lost/used the cards to, so I used the bookplates that I didn't cut quite as neatly to decorate those. I glued one bookplate on each envelope and wrote the recipient's name on the bookplate. (Adorbs!) I also wrote "Handmade Bookplates for Your Library" in a pretty script. I put an assortment of 10 bookplates in each envelope and left them unsealed.

I think these will be a hit among my friends with big libraries!

What do you think?