Recycled Paper Bookmark

     When I was a little girl, I used to make recycled paper bookmarks with my mom.  We'd punch heart and teddy bear shapes out of colorful sheets of construction paper and glue them to the back side of white paper that had already been used.  For this week's craft, I came up with a slightly more sophisticated take on this childhood craft.

Materials:
*Empty cereal box
*Scrap paper
*Acrylic paint (I used red, blue, yellow, green, white, and gold)
*Paintbrush
*Shape punches (e.g. heart and butterfly)
*Small circle punch
*Ribbon
*Scissors
*All purpose adhesive
*Water

Directions:
*Choose a paint color to use for the background of your bookmark.
*Mix together paint and water (I used a cream cheese container lid for this part) until paint reaches its desired thinness.
*Paint over the scrap paper.
*Set aside to dry.  If you don't have time to wait for it to dry naturally, you can speed up the process using a hairdryer.
*Once it's dry, cut out a rectangle of the paper and an equally sized rectangle of cardboard and glue together.
*Use water to thin out the various paint colors you want to use for your shape punches.
*Paint over the scrap paper.  You probably won't need very much of any particular color.  I had tons of leftover paper when I finished.

*Set aside to dry or dry with a hairdryer.
*Punch out shapes.
*Arrange along the bookmark and then glue down.
*Punch a hole near the top of the bookmark and loop ribbon through it.
*Note: to add another layer of meaning/sentimentality to your bookmark, use pages from something that has meaning to you.  I used pages from an old draft of my master's thesis.