Click on the thumbnail images to the left to see more detailed pictures of existing bookmarks. Click on the 'Custom' button above if you are interested in commissioning a bookmark with your own theme and colors.
Affordable Jewelmarks:
for under $35
Bookmarks as Functional Art
To me, bookmarks are magic! They mark the place where the world of the story intersects the world in which I live, the place where the world of the mind meets the world of the senses. To me, this place is marvelous and magical and very, very cool. This is what I get passionate about. The magic place should be honored, celebrated, made a focus of attention.
These bookmarks are greatly varied in form and style; each is a unique work of art, with a character of its own. Some are simpler and more serviceable for daily use, some are lavish and better suited for use with books of special significance: favorite reference books, the family Bible, a classic volume of historic significance. Some styles are suitable to serve also as jewelry for the reader as well as for the book.
NEW: The Mark o' Five Tails
Grace your songbook with multi-mark Jewelmark designed to insert into the spine of a songbook or hymnall and allow you to mark mutiple pages at once. These cost $75 for a five-tail mark and must be custome ordered to be sure it will fit your book. Please contact the artist at laramie@dreamspell.net
The Child Empress of Mars
This Jewelmark has been donated to the Interstitial Arts Foundation's annual auction. The winning bid will go to support the organizaiton. The IAF is dedicated to the study, support, and promotion of interstitial art: literature, music, visual and performance art found in between categories and genres – art that crosses borders.
The Jewelmark was inspired by the short story of the same title, written by Theodora Goss, published in the IAF's anthology collection for this year. Starting with a gauze ribbon, I doubled it and sewed the lengths together so that the design from one side shows mistily through to the other, and used a wandering crewel-stitch to secure the pieces together. To further the impression of heavy mists described in the story, I'm making lots of feathery structures with tiny translucent white seed beads and gold, garnet, & translucent-gold beads. One of the things I liked most about the story that inspired the piece was the way it had of making alien things seem oddly familiar. So, hidden among the 'mists' are a lot of odd little things: fish, flower, insect, and bird beads of various sorts.
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The Realm of the Senses honors the Realm of Ideas and Imagination.
Beads and semi-precious stones, in lovely colors and natural shapes, represent the treasures of the physical realm. Strung together one by one to form meaningful artistic wholes, these bookmarks echo the process of writing, in which each significant word is strung one by one, together to form meaningful thoughts, stories and ideas.
The role of the bookmark is to assist the reader in finding his or her place in the flow of ideas. It's a minor role, but a helpful one. To the mind that sees the material world as all-important, it may be humbling to see the Treasures of the Earth placed in such a position relative to the Realm of the Mind. And yet, as every reader knows, the best books are written with respect to the smallest and most humble aspects of material existence. It is this respect that merits in turn the best that the material world has to offer.
Physical beauty that transcends itself to create meaning,
bringing itself to serve in the realm of ideas, laying itself in the doorway
that is found in the open pages of a book. There it can remain as a link between
ideas and sense, dangling, to be played with by the idle fingers of the reader
until he or she is ready to turn again to the world of his or her own experience.
Or, in the closed book, reminding the reader that all the riches of the world
are still less than the riches to which the mind can ascend.
DreamSpell Gift Cards are now available toward the purchase of JewelMarks Bookmarks
The Perfect Gift for lovers of Books and Beauty
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How The Dreamspell Gift Cards Work
To use the gift card, shop at the following sites:
www.dreamspell.net/ for Kids Art Prints or FSF Art Prints, and at
www.dreamspell.net/crafts/ for JewelMarks Beaded Bookmarks
www.cafepress.com/dreamspell : for T-shirts, Totes, Mugs, Postcards, Greeting Cards, and Discordian Coloring Books.
To use the Gift Card DO NOT click the BUY options on those sites,
INSTEAD, email Laramie@Dreamspell.net with your selection, mailing address and the unique identifier CODE marked on the back of the gift card. SHIPPING is FREE with this offer. If the cost of your selection is more than the value of the card, you can make a PayPal payment to the email address above to cover the difference. If the cost is less, you will retain credit at Dreamspell shops, so retain your card and code number.