Make Your Own Shark Fin Bookmark #sharkweek

If you or your kiddos are fans of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, you’re going to love this easy DIY I’m sharing with you today. In my Free Shark Fonts post, I talked about how I have a fear of sharks yet I still love to watch Shark Week. My fear stems from two experiences:

When I was a teenager, I had a shark chase me in waist high water at the beach. I.was.petrified.
The movie Jaws.

It didn’t help that I grew up in Florida where it was not uncommon for there to be reports of shark bites, shark attacks or aerial photos of sharks swimming very close to the beach coastline. Let’s just say that I have a healthy respect for their predatory nature and their big teeth. 😉

Materials

felt pieces (gray, blue, and white)
cardboard template (I used the inside of a cereal box)
shark fin and ocean water template (FREE download below)
pencil
scissors
hot glue gun and glue sticks
six to eight-inch piece of ribbon (your choice of color–I used white)
marker
Optional: embroidery thread and needle to stitch shark fin

Download

Instructions:

Download the shark fin and ocean water template above. Cut them out and trace onto your cardboard using a pencil.

For reference, my shark fin measured approximately three inches tall and my ocean water template was approximately three inches long and one inch in height.

Cut out the cardboard fin and ocean water template. Using a light marker, trace these shapes onto your felt and then cut these out. You need two felt pieces for your fin and two felt pieces for the ocean water (front and back).

Since we want the shark fin to be durable, we’re going to use the cardboard fin in between our two felt pieces. First, you’ll need to trim the edges of the cardboard fin to make it smaller than your felt fin pieces.

Once you’ve done that, hot glue the cardboard to the base of your shark fin felt. Next, take your ribbon and hot glue one end of it onto the top of the cardboard.

Hot glue the remaining shark fin felt piece over the cardboard and you’ve got the top of your bookmark done!

Repeat the steps above using your ocean template felt, ocean template cardboard, and ribbon and now you have the bottom of your bookmark!

Optional: Using white embroidery thread and an embroidery needle, stitch the edges of the felt using a simple whip stitch (or something similar). I like the way the stitching gives the fins a more defined appearance.

That’s all there is to it! You’ve just made a shark fin bookmark!

The bottom ocean part is what you use to put in between the pages of your book–marking where you left off. The top shark fin piece shows your reading progress and looks pretty darn cool sticking out of the top of the book.

When the shark fin gets close to the ocean (shown above), I start hearing a certain theme song:

*Sensitive Content*

On a more serious note, did you know that in some countries people cut the fins off of sharks while they’re still alive and then throw the sharks back in the ocean? This cruel act is done simply for greed as shark fins are often sold to countries in the Far East for the sole purpose of profiting off of Shark Fin soup. Restaurants may charge $100 or more for one bowl of Shark Fin soup. Apparently, the consumers of this soup don’t care that the finless sharks often starve or bleed to death after their fin is removed.

If you’d like to see an end to this cruel practice:

Join Discovery and Oceana to support legislation that will help protect sharks from extinction by banning the buying and selling of shark fin products in the U.S.

Let’s all do our part to help sharks thrive for years to come so that they can continue to do their part in the oceanic ecosystem. Plus, you can’t have Shark Week without sharks!

If you make your own shark fin bookmark, I’d love to see photos. Tag me on social media or share it own our Facebook page.