Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Appreciate your teachers - it's not too late (or expensive)!

Good morning CraftyStealers!

This week is teacher appreciation week, and if you are anything like me, your kids have more than one teacher to thank! My son has his kinder teacher, music teacher, gym teachers and art teacher, and my daughter has two preschool teachers.  A lot of presents to buy and it adds up quickly!

While searching for a project that wouldn't eat away at my budget, I found this post at Little Birdie Secrets' blog about decorating hand sanitizer bottles with stickers and rub-ons. Perfect, useful AND inexpensive!

A quick trip to the dollar store (the cheapest place for nice big bottles with labels that peel off) and I was ready to get started!  I decided to take the personalization a step further (and use up the materials I have), so I just used some pink and black Silhouette adhesive vinyl instead of stickers.  I made these bottles for my son's kinder teacher, art teacher and music teacher. (I decided the gym teachers will just get gift cards, as they don't have a "classroom" to keep this in!
The trickiest part is peeling off the labels.  I had to pull out my trusty bottle of Goo Gone to get the bottle completely clean.  I found some images online (dingbat font for the musical images and some free clipart images for the palette and paintbrush).  The whole project took about 30 minutes from start to finish and cost me $4 for the bottles, and about $3 worth of Silhouette adhesive vinyl (I smushed everything together and used about 6 inches of each color). Not bad for a cute gift that is also practical.  I had my son make each teacher a card of thanks, and sent them off to school!

If you are looking for some other crafty Teacher Appreciation projects (or end of the year teacher gifts), the very cool crafty blog, Skip To My Lou has a ton of great links to fun, and easy projects.

If you haven't already checked it out, today's steal, the Inkadinkadoo "Girlfriend" stamps, even has a "sweet" sentiment that would be perfect for a card to thank your teacher - accompanied by a treat of course!
Happy Crafting!

1 comment:

  1. OMG this is soooo cute! I don't know if I'll have time to finish it before the end of the week! :)

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