its Stephanie here and welcome back in today's video we are going to be creating a bookmark tassel and we're going to be using it with the new cross stitch bookmark dynamics so I have a bookmark here that I created using our new downloadable patterns which I will link in the video description below so I stitched all of this off-screen just to save a little bit of time but before we get to the Assembly of the tassel I wanted to show you how I completed the bookmark so when you get the bookmark die you and I cut the bookmark shape which is what I have here and I've done the stitching on and if you detach the holes from the center you can also cut just a straight solid panel so I have a solid panel I have the stitch piece and then I also have the topper piece there cut from limelight and I'm going to assemble all these together before adding them to some pink cardstock for a little bit of added contrast I added score tape all the way around the edges of the finished bookmark as well as onto some of the stitching I just like to add a little bit in the center just so I know everything is really adhered well and then I'm pressing down and adhering that back piece to the bookmark and this just gives it a really nice finished look and you kind of don't see anything through those holes where we did the stitching now I have the our story stamp set from Bertie Brown and there is a sentiment in here that happens to fit perfectly on the top of the bookmark it says read relax repeat so it works perfectly with the bookmark die so I stamped that on there and now I'm going to add the pink cardstock so for this I've already trimmed it down to fit the size of the bookmark and I'm adding a little pencil mark where the hole is in the top of the bookmark and that's because we need to cut a hole into the pink piece since we're going to kind of overlap it we need to be able to still add our tassel once we're finished so I use the whole reinforcement die to die cut the opening into the pink cardstock and now I'm adding score tape to our finished bookmark and we're going to adhere it on to the cardstock piece so I'm lining this up and making sure I have a nice even margin all the way around and then you can see that our two holes line up perfectly so we're able to easily add our tassel once we have it completed to finish the top part here I'm just going to use my scissors and very carefully follow the lines of the top of the bookmark and I'm going to make sure that I'm leaving roughly the same amount of cardstock so it looks like it's one complete piece and it actually looks like we just die-cut it I added some more score tape to the topper piece here and since this is already sized to fit onto the bookmark it's going to fit really nicely on there and I can just adhere it straight down so now we have the bookmark complete we can work on our tassel so this is kind of the main part of the video I really wanted to show how to create your own tassel it's very quick and easy to do and the more that you do them the easier it gets so in my hand I have a piece of five-inch cardstock it's a square of cardstock and I've scored it down the center and I folded it in half so it's two and a half inches by five inches long once it's folded and this is what we're going to use to create the tassel okay so once your cardstock is ready to go you want the fold at the bottom and you want the opening at the top and you're going to take your twine or your ribbon or whatever it is that you're creating the tassel with and you're going to start wrapping it around the cardstock piece so I'm kind of holding it in place at the top there and then I'm going to slowly start to wrap this around the cardstock now this is all dependent on how thick you want your tassel to be so the thicker you want it the more twine you're going to need to wrap around the cardstock piece okay so while I'm doing my speed wrapping here since I did kind of speed this up since it took me a couple minutes to fully wrap the twine I also wanted to mention that the piece of cardstock you're using is going to determine how long your tassel is so my cardstock when folded like I mentioned before is two and a half inches so that's going to be the length of my finish tassel if you want your longer you're gonna want to start out with a bigger piece of cardstock if you want it smaller you don't have to worry at all because we're gonna end up trimming this one down anyway and you'll see how I do that once we're finished okay so once we are finished wrapping our twine and we're happy with how thick our task is going to be I'm going to bring that twine up to the top and I'm going to trim that off so I still have the top of that cardstock pieces the opening and the bottom is where the fold is so now I'm going to cut an additional piece of twine here and this is what we're going to use to create the top part of the tassel now mine I cut way too long you definitely don't need this much but it didn't matter I just kind of cut off the extra once I was finished and what I like to do at this part is I like to double up my twine so I take that piece that I cut and I meet the two ends and then I have two pieces of twine together with one end being a loop and you'll see at the end here why I do it just makes it so much easier to add it to the bookmark so now what we need to do is we need to slide this twine underneath of all of that wrapped twine and we're going to pull it down to the bottom of the cardstock piece now the bottom is still the folded piece so once we have it pulled all the way down to the bottom there we're going to tie it into a knot and this is going to form the top part of the tassel now the thing to keep in mind here is the little loop end is going to be the string between the top of the tassel and the actual bookmark so the longer you keep this the longer your tassel is going to hang I have mine a little bit too long I wish I would have shortened it a bit but it still worked out okay in the end but you just want to make sure that you pull that as short as you want it before you tie the knot because you're not going to be able to shorten it once we're finished here so once you have it where you want it you just want to take the two ends and tie it into a really nice tight knot at the bottom there you want this not to be pretty tight so I'm going to get my tweezers that kind of hold themselves shut and this is going to help me to hold that in place while I get it ready to do the second part of the knot so I'm just gonna kind of clip those on there to hold that for me and then I'm going to form another knot right over top and pull that down as well and I'm gonna really pull tightly onto these pieces of twine we don't want the bookmark to fall apart once we've created it so you really want to make sure that all of your knots are pulled really tightly so once I have that pulled nice and tight I decided that I actually wanted to do three knots to really make sure that this didn't come apart so I'm gonna add one more on here that's once again personal preference it just depends on how many times you want to knot it and I'm going to pull tightly once again just to make sure it's really tied together and now we have the top part of the tassel made even though it doesn't really look like you're right now so the next thing we need to do is we need to get the tassel off of this cardstock piece and what we're going to do is we're going to cut it off so you're gonna want to use a really nice sharp pair of scissors I have a big pair of Fisker scissors here and I'm just going along the opening of that card stock piece so remember the top was the open piece and I'm running my scissors across and cutting through all of that twine and what we're left with is all of this twine hanging loosely which is our tassel and we have the two top strings at the top which is what we use to tie around the bottom when it was still folded on the paper you can see I have my loop down there which is what I mentioned for the length you make sure you have it as long or short as you want it since we can't change that now and I also cut off the excess that we had at the other end of that string when we tied it now that string is not going to go to waste because we need to add a head on to the tassel and this is just what gives it that finished look and holds everything together and make sure that none of the tassel pieces kind of come out of that tassel tie so to create the head on the tassel you just want to take that extra string and you want to wrap it around the top piece and you want to tie it into a knot once it's tied into a knot I'm kind of holding it really tightly together and I'm taking all of the tassel pieces and I'm pulling on them and what that's doing is just making sure that all of the tassel string in the very top part which is called the head of the tassel is pulled really tight and we don't have any loose strings kind of sticking out once I have all of the twine pulled really tightly and I'm happy with it I'm going to take the two string ends that I had started to tie around the top and I'm going to wrap them around the tassel a couple of times before I tie them off and what I like to do this just to give it a really nice finished look because it gives you a nice layer of the twine kind of wrapped around but once again this is personal preference if you prefer just to have one string going around then that's all you need to add it's completely up to you I just really think it looks cool to have a continuous amount of string going around before tying it together so once you're happy with how much string you have wrapped around you can just go ahead and tie this off now and this is going to pretty much complete the tassel aside from some trimming so once again I'm going to tie this into a really tight knot and I'm going to do it a couple times make it a double knot just to make sure it's not going to come apart and once you have this piece here tied this is going to form part of your tassel so those little twine pieces can kind of just get pulled down into the rest of the tassel and they'll blend right in with everything else so once we have everything all tied together it's time to give our tassel a haircut and you can see on mine I have really uneven ends and I think that's because when I was creating it I accidentally kind of pulled and knotted it not quite in the center but I'm gonna cut off quite a bit of it anyway so it didn't really matter to me so I'm using my really sharp scissors and I just went along the bottom and held it together with my hand and cut off all of that extra at the bottom and now I'm just kind of going around and trimming off a couple of the little ones that still stayed a little uneven and then I'm left with this perfectly Shay Tassel I have a bunch of twine in there so it's a really nice thickness and now I can add it to the bookmark and this is where that loop in the tassel becomes really handy because you can just slide it through the opening on the front of the bookmark and then just bring that tassel down through the loop and pull down on it and it will tighten it on to the top of the bookmark and now you have a completed tassel and it was really really easy to adhere so now I'm just gonna kind of show you how it fits into a book this book market size really nicely to fit into standard sized novels and while I'm doing that I just wanted to mention a couple of things again the thickness of the bookmark tassel depends on how much twine you wrap around so if you don't want it as thick as mine you want to add a little bit less twine onto the cardstock piece and for the length of the string in between the bookmark and the tassel if you want that to be shorter you want to make sure that you shorten that up a little bit before you do the initial knot at the beginning so that finishes our cross stitch bookmark with our handmade tassel I hope you've got some ideas in today's video for ways to create your own tassels they are a lot of fun and it really makes it really unique because you're able to completely make an entire handmade gift with both the bookmark dye as well as your handmade tassel so thanks so much for joining me in today's video as always I appreciate you being here and I hope to see you in another video soon