You’re Like a Bookend, You Hold Me Up

I know I usually post stuff I do for my boyfriend, but it was “Treat ‘Yo Self” time. I undertook a DIY project for myself. I needed bookends for the books I’m reading this semester that kept falling over on my desk. I began by looking on Etsy (as always) for bookends for my desk. I was going to buy seashell bookends but then this cute one popped up.

Boy & Girl Bookends

If there were “official LDR bookends”, this one would be it! They cost about $24; I didn’t want to spend that much money on bookends when I didn’t love every aspect of them. So I decided to make them myself.

I searched online for similar silhouettes and found this one that I liked the most. Again, I didn’t love every aspect of it so I decided to combine the two images.

I needed to buy the supplies to make bookends on my own; it was surprisingly cheap. Each bookend was $2 (total of $4). And then I bought two pens, a sharpie for tracing the details and a paint-based pen for filling in the silhouette. The pens cost about $5 total. So all in all, this DIY Bookends project cost me less than $10!

As you all know, I am artistically challenged, but I did my best tracing and combining the two images to make the perfect silhouette. This was my original idea: a guy and girl simply reading back to back. But then my wonderful roommate, Joseline (who I regularly ask for advice on all things on my blog) suggested I add a tree in between. And I couldn’t simply have a tree without a heart with out initials carved in it! So I added that!

Then I came into a slight logistical problem. The details I was able to draw on paper were hard to cut out. So I asked my friend to draw the image free-hand on the bookends themselves.

Once my friend drew the images on the wood, I traced it with the black sharpie.

Next, I colored in the silhouettes with the paint-based pen.

The last step was tracing the tree with the paint-based pen. Wa-lah! Here is the finished product!

When I started putting together this post, I was searching for inspiration for the title. Unfortunately, most of the poems about bookends were sad; totally understandable since the word has “end” in it. Finally, I came across this poem entitled “Bookends” by Gill Winston Spooner and it had a happy tone; it was about family, specifically parents. Anyways, I changed the last stanza to fit our situation. Here is my version:

we’ll be bookends, too.
you can be on the left
i’ll be on the right
strong, beautiful bookends we’ll be.

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