Tutorial: Alice in Wonderland Inspired Embroidered Bookmark with Felt

Sponsored by Disney Book Group

This simple handmade embroidered bookmark, inspired by the new book Unbirthday, is an easy project for a young girl to make.

Our family has long loved the story of Alice in Wonderland (remember our family Alice Halloween costumes?). So when Disney Books reached out about creating an Alice-inspired craft to go with the release of the new book Unbirthday, Adeline and I happily agreed. Plus, did you know that 2020 is the 155^th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll?

Unbirthday by Liz Braswell is the newest installment in Disney’s A Twisted Tale series,  The book is geared towards Tweens & Teens and explores what happens to Alice after Wonderland, and what happens when she has to go back? This is the 10^th title in the Twisted Tale series, which takes your favorite Disney stories and gives them a little twist. I especially love the way these books give more agency to the classic Disney heroines, making characters like Alice a little more grown-up and multidimensional.

This year Adeline and I have been doing a lot of embroidery (see our getting started with kids embroidery here) and have started working with other mediums beyond fabric, like felt and ribbon.

Therefore, we decided to make a Queen of Hearts inspired embroidered bookmark, complete with ribbon, felt and a simple embroidery running stitch. The whole embroidered bookmark project only took about 20 minutes – perfect for beginner stitchers.

Embroidered Bookmark Supplies

Red and white felt
Black embroidery floss
Wide red ribbon for your bookmark (1.5”)
Scraps of thin ribbon in red, white, and/or black

Step-by-Step Embroidered Bookmark Instructions

Cut a white heart (about 2.5” wide) and then a smaller red heart (about 1.5” wide) to fit inside of it

Cut small ribbon in 3-4” strips

Secure ribbons with embroidery floss to white heart, then place the red heart over the ribbons. Then, using the floss, stitch the red heart to the white heart using a running stitch.

Attach your completed heart to the ribbon using a few stitches.

Isn’t it darling? Adeline gushed and gushed about how much she loved this embroidered bookmark project. We made it after breakfast one morning, which I think is a great reminder that crafting and spending quality time with our kids can happen at any time.

I hope this inspires you to make a simple felt embroidered bookmark for yourself or with your daughter. Be sure to order a copy of Unbirthday to go with your cute bookmark.

Click here to purchase, and read the full synopsis below!

More About the Book

What if Wonderland was in peril and Alice was very, very late?

Alice is different than other eighteen-year-old ladies in Kexford, which is perfectly fine with her. She’d rather spend golden afternoons with her trusty camera or in her aunt Vivian’s lively salon, ignoring her sister’s wishes that she stop all that “nonsense” and become a “respectable” member of society. Alice is happy to meander to Miss. Yao’s teashop or to visit the children playing in the Square. She’s also interested in learning more about the young lawyer she met there, but just because she’s curious, of course, not because he was sweet and charming.

But when Alice develops photographs she has recently taken about town, familiar faces of old suddenly appear in the place of her actual subjects—the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar. There’s something eerily off about them, even for Wonderland creatures. And as Alice develops a self-portrait, she finds the most disturbing image of all—a badly-injured dark-haired girl asking for Alice’s help. Mary Ann.

Returning to the place of nonsense from her childhood, Alice finds herself on a mission to stop the Queen of Hearts’ tyrannical rule and to find her place in both worlds. But will she able to do so . . . before the End of Time?