End of Year Teacher Gift

I can't believe tomorrow is the last day of school. It really seems like just last week I dropped my little guy off for his very first day of kindergarten. I have mixed emotions. I'm sad that it's over because he enjoys school so much, but I'm also looking forward to spending time with him this summer. He is growing by leaps and bounds so I try to soak it all in while I can. 

I can't even begin to say how much I appreciate his teacher this year. He is phenomenal. Absolutely amazing and deserves much more appreciation than I'm able to convey with a few gifts through the year. 

Sticking true to myself I waited until the last possible minute to figure out what I was going to take for the end of year teacher appreciation gift. Trusty Pinterest didn't let me down. I did change how I packaged the gift but the overall idea originally came from a pin I saw on there. 

Armed with that info I went to Wal-Mart to see what I could come up with. I found the drink dispenser and fell in love with it. This one in the picture is a 2 gallon capacity and plastic. There was also one half that size that was actual glass. However, the drink mixes wouldn't fit through the opening at all on the smaller one so I decided on the larger one and added a second drink mix. 

I opened the graham crackers and layered the little packages in the very bottom. I put the bag of marshmallows on top of those and then tucked the candy bars into the front and back. The glow bracelets I just thought were a fun little bonus as he has young kids that will probably enjoy them if they spend an evening outside around a fire making s'mores. I stuck those in the back. My only problem was getting both drink mix containers in there. I'm really hoping he can get them back out. They are snug!

Printed up a quick Thank You on cardstock and asked my kiddo what he wanted to say to his teacher. I told him how to spell the words as he wrote it. Tied it on with a ribbon and it was complete. I hope he enjoys it and takes a much deserved break this summer to just enjoy a little time to himself and with his family. 

Teacher Appreciation Week: Day 5

It's the final day of Teacher Appreciation Week. I must say, I've enjoyed this week so much! It was actually my inspiration to start all this. It finally clicked that when I'm being creative is when I'm the happiest. I absolutely love making things and personalizing gifts. I make these things because I enjoy it so much. 

When I took in the gift on Wednesday the teacher had the nicest things to say that make it all so worth it. He told me that he has enjoyed every single gift and the creativity behind them. Then he went on to say 'I don't know how anybody will top you as a Homeroom Mom, I already told all the 1st grade teachers that you're the mom to fight for in their class next year'. 

My final gift was a Target gift card. He listed that as his favorite place to shop. I went into Target to get the gift card and saw an empty slot for a really cute teacher gift card. A super sweet employee went to the back where the gift cards are kept to see if they had any left and found me one! My printable was inspired by this pin on Pinterest. I needed to word it just a little bit differently though because it was from the whole class. 

I pasted a Target logo imagine to my document, making it the size I needed for the gift card to fit in that second ring. Then just typed out the text that I wanted and printed it. I cut a piece of blue cardstock to be slightly bigger. I chose blue because that's the teachers favorite color. Using a craft knife I cut around that first bottom edge of red on the logo, going from midway on one side to midway on the other. Essentially it made a little pocket to slide the card down in. I then used a glue stick and applied glue only around the outside edge and glued it in the center of my blue cardstock. The card slides right down in there leaving just enough showing at the top. 

That wraps up Teacher Appreciation Week! I can't believe the school year is almost over. I swear we just started last month. 

Teacher Appreciation Week: Day 4

We're in the home stretch of Teacher Appreciation Week. I have had so much fun taking in the gifts each morning! 

One of the favorites the teacher listed was a Vanilla Cherry Limeade from Sonic. For this gift I went and bought a Sonic gift card and also asked for a bunch of mints. I got the mints so that it would add weight to the bag and also just because it's a fun little extra. With only the gift card in the bag it just felt empty. 

Again I used trusty Google to find a Sonic limeade image to use. Using the same OpenOffice freeware as mentioned before I created the label for the bag. I used a dotted red border and a fontwork from within the software to achieve the curved letters. For those of you better at this graphic design stuff I'm sure you have an easier or better way. This is what works for me in a pinch. I typed out what I wanted it to say. Pasted the Sonic image in the middle and resized it to fit. Printed it out on yellow paper and simply glued it to the paper bag. After I was finished with this gift I realized that it closely resembles the 'push to order' button at Sonic. Bonus!

I dumped all the mints into the bag. Threw in the gift card. Folded over the top and punched two holes. Stuck a ribbon through and tied a bow. That's it!

Massive Minion Cake

Every year my son picks his birthday party theme and I make the cake. He usually has it picked out MONTHS in advance. Surprisingly he never changes his mind either. This year for his sixth birthday he requested a Despicable Me Minion cake, more specifically a one eyed Minion. I searched........and searched........and searched.........and searched some more online looking at various pictures and reading tutorials. I finally decided that I liked the look of this cake the best. There was no other information in the link on Pinterest, only the picture of the cake. 

I knew that I had my work cut out for me. I had never used fondant. I had never made an actual 3D shaped cake. I. Was. Scared.

I ended up covering my cake in yellow buttercream instead of fondant due to the massive size of the cake. I used 9" round pans and the 9" Wilton sports ball dome pan. There are five layers plus the dome shaped cake on top. I have added this cake to the Coolest Birthday Cakes website with very detailed instructions. For that reason I won't retype it all here. You can find all the information here.

This was my finished Minion cake after approximately 10 hours of work. Best of all was the smile on Ben's face. It was perfection to him.

Teacher Appreciation Lunch: Cupcakes

Our school designated Wednesday of Teacher Appreciation Week for the staff lunch. There are a group of us that signed up to bring food throughout the year for various events. I signed up to take a side dish and dessert. I decided on cupcakes so that it would be easy to grab and go if they needed to. 

I do a lot of cake baking. This will come as a surprise to some but I always use boxed cake mixes. I don't follow the box directions though. Using a tip I saw on Pinterest quite awhile back I alter them just a bit. Instead of water use milk, same amount as called for. Replace the oil with milted butter that has been doubled. For example, if you box calls for 1/3 C of oil use 2/3 C of melted butter instead. Use REAL butter. You will never ever find anything I make using margarine. Yuck! Also use one extra egg than called for. Other than that follow the mixing and baking instructions on the box. 

When making cupcakes it's important to get as close as possible to the same amount of batter in each liner. I don't like using measuring cups because it's hard to get all the batter out. I actually use my cookie scoop. It's approximately 1 TBSP so I use three scoops in each liner. The reason I like to use that is because with the little spring loaded arm it's easy to get the batter out into the liner. Using this method results in all of the cupcakes being the same height and not too tall so easier to decorate. 

Earlier in the day I melted some chocolate chips to use for my chocolate words. Just microwave them in 30 second intervals at 50% power stirring after each round until melted completely. Using a piping bag and my #5 Wilton round tip I piped out 'thank' and 'you' onto waxed paper on a cookie sheet. Be sure you make extra because I can almost promise you that at least one (or a few) will break when you peel them off. After I had piped them all out I put the cookie sheets into the freezer for the rest of the day so that they would be good a firm. 

I chose a chocolate cake mix and baked my cupcakes. I used this recipe for Cloud Frosting. She has a really great video that will walk you through it if you need a visual. It is so yummy and not too sweet, just the right amount. Once they had cooled completely I started decorating. Somehow I have managed to misplace my jumbo round tip so I had to just wing it and used a gallon size freezer bag with the corner cut off. I had full expectations for my frosting being piped on a lot prettier but it is what it is. I just squeezed a big blob on top of each cupcake. Working quickly peel your chocolate letters off the waxed paper and place them on the frosting. I ran into a small problem here. It's getting warm and I refuse to turn my A/C on until absolutely necessary. I underestimated just how warm my kitchen was and my letters started drooping before I could even get them back into the refrigerator. I was using small boxes that held six cupcakes each so I worked one box at a time. Between boxes I placed the chocolate words back into the freezer. 

I delivered them to the school this morning. I hope the teachers enjoy them and know just how much I appreciate them, not just this week but all year long. The least I can do is bring in a treat every once in awhile. 

Teacher Appreciation Week: Day 3

Continuing Teacher Appreciation Week, my next gift is homemade cookies. I'm trying this new recipe that I found on Pinterest. I picked it for a few reasons. One, the photos had me salivating just looking at them. Second, it includes gram measurements for the ingredients. Baking is an art and while I don't claim to be a master, I do understand how important it is for the ingredient amounts to be correct. Three, it's very popular on Pinterest with great comments and reviews. 

The night before I wanted to bake the cookies I prepared the dough so that it would have ample time to chill in the refrigerator overnight. The next morning I turned on the oven and started making the cookie balls. Follow the instructions in the recipe and make them tall so that they don't spread too thin when they bake. My cookies didn't turn out quite as pretty but I'm sure it's because I used about two tablespoons of dough instead of three. The recipe as written yields 16 cookies and I needed 20 to fill the box I was using. Using my cookie scoop that is approximately one tablespoon I scooped out two blobs of dough, rolled it up with my hands tall and flattened the bottom so that it would sit on the baking sheet. Using this measurement I came out with exactly 24 cookies........already down to 22. I can't send cookies to school without tasting them first! These are really good cookies. Very soft and chewy as promised. 

As I pulled my baking sheets out of the oven I stuck two more chocolate chips on top of each cookie and let them just kind of melt into place. It made the cookies prettier and who doesn't love more added chocolate, am I right?

Once they had cooled completely and the chocolate on top had time to firm back up I stacked them in the box. My husband often doubts my reasoning for saving things. This is a prime example of why it's not always a bad thing. The box I used for my cookies is actually a donut box from Wal-Mart. For whatever reason my son thinks donuts are one of the worlds finest creations and has to have one each time we go in there. The last time we bought two donuts so I put them in one of the boxes they offer at the self serve donut area. After we got home and I was cleaning up I noticed that the box was clean with no sticky donut mess inside so I decided to put it up in case I ever needed it. Bingo! Perfect cookie box to deliver to a teacher. 

My label on top was just another quick creation. I Google searched for cookie images and picked the one I liked best. Pasted that into my document and decreased the transparency of it so that it was a little 'faded'. Added the text on top and printed it out. Cut that cookie out and taped it to my box right on top of the clear window leaving enough space so that the actual cookies are visible.

Teacher Appreciation Week: Day 2

Continuing Teacher Appreciation Week, this is for day two. For favorite food his teacher wrote 'Chinese or Italian'. I gave him a gift card to an Italian restaurant for Christmas so decided to go with Chinese for this gift. 

I went to Panda Express to purchase the gift card and asked if I could have a to go container and fortune cookies to put in with it. They were happy to give me the cookies but didn't have the traditional Chinese food container. For that I went to Hobby Lobby. Using the 40% off coupon it was less than $1.00 for the container. 

This label was a little trickier. I had just a red circle with the phrase in big letters when I looked down at the fortune cookie wrapper and had the idea to try and duplicate the logo. Because I'm not great at graphic design I actually printed to things. The circle that I created with the text and the Panda Express logo that I Google searched. I then cut out the red circle with the panda bear from the center and glued it to my label. As you can see it's completely crooked but you get the idea. I cut out the entire label and glued that baby on with the trusty purple glue stick. Stuffed the fortune cookies inside and put the gift card right on top. 

Done.

Teacher Appreciation Week: Day 1

As most of you know, this week (May 5th-9th) is Teacher Appreciation Week. Now I know I sound partial when I say my son has an AMAZING teacher. Yet, it's true. His teacher is also a male which presented a small challenge for teacher gifting. All the pretty bottles of lotion or flower bouquets just weren't going to cut it. This guy spends seven hours a day, five days a week trapped in a room with 20 kindergartners. He freaking rocks! As the designated Homeroom Mom I knew it was up to me to get creative. I browsed Pinterest of course and got a lot of inspiration but never found exactly what I wanted. Armed with what I had seen I went to work creating my own cheesy phrases with the wording I needed to accompany a different gift for each day of the week. At the start of the school year I received a small list of his favorite things. While short and not incredibly detailed it was enough to pull it together for a week of gift giving.

One of the items on his list was favorite drink: Dr. Pepper. I have absolutely no graphic design skills. I don't even own Microsoft Word. I created everything using the freeware Open Office software. I Googled 'school border clip art' to find the crayon border and simply copy and pasted to my project. Then just added a text box. Printed out that label. Grabbed a six pack of Dr. Pepper because the glass bottles are prettier for gifting. Plugged in the hot glue gun. Made a small cut on each side of the label to put the ribbon through. Then just glued it on. Easy peasy, nice and easy. 

  

Howdy!

Welcome to my minuscule place on the web. Here's the deal, I don't expect for this blog to gain much traffic. I'm okay with that. I started this as a way to keep all of my Pinterest inspired crafts, cakes, and whatever else all in one place. Why? Because each time I post something like that on Facebook I get asked how I did it or where I got the idea. This will give me a place to provide better detailed information to people who want to know but might not be my friend on Facebook. I make no promises that every single thing I post will interest you. I will fully disclose where I got my ideas from because they aren't always original. Most things that I make spark from an idea I find on Pinterest but sometimes customize it to fit with whatever I need it for. I will whenever possible include detailed instructions. Going forward I will make an effort to take photos during the process, especially for cakes. I'm just another stay at home mom who enjoys being creative. You will see bad grammar and possibly misspelled words if they manage to get past the spell check. I will attempt to answer any questions the best that I can. That pretty much sums it up.