Friday, April 22, 2011

Easter Teacher Gifts...

Try saying that title three times quickly!!  Hahaha...  Well Easter is almost upon us - already!  (I know everyone always says this, but where has this year gone?) 

As with every holiday where gifts can be given, I needed to get together some gifts for Alex's teachers.  I have no idea who the teacher's assistant is in his room at the moment (it seems to change daily - and sometimes there isn't one if numbers are low) so this time I just needed to do one for his teacher, and one each for the owners (who are very good to Alex).

I thought about getting them something ready made - Bed Bath & Table have some beautiful Easter mugs, tea towels and decorations of all sorts...  But his sweet teacher, Kay, is very into making things where ever possible, so I felt I should honour that (somewhat) and make it a bit more personal.  Also I made a new years resolution to make as many gifts as possible this year.... and so far there have been a big, fat ZERO that fit that criteria (not so much as a card!), so I need to up my average a bit :)

With that in mind, I hit the local discount shop for goodies...  once there, I bought a pack of 5 plain white noodle boxes for a grand total of $2.00.  I had inventoried my supplies at home before I left and discovered that I had a hot glue gun (never used), craft glue, ribbon, a permanent marker and plenty of paintings and drawings done by Alex - this was all I needed!

As I said, I'd never used a glue gun before... so there were a few lessons learned on this one, but never mind.  I could go into great detail but actually, it was very quick and easy.... we're not talking rocket science here.  I basically just glued the ribbon in a line around the noodle boxes with the glue gun - the three main lessons I learned are these....  1.  be certain where you want to position it, because once you apply pressure, its not going anywhere!  2.  don't keep pumping and pumping the trigger if you're doing a small fiddly job - it will ooze slowly but if you keep pumping, it just squirts out a big lump which will go everywhere... which brings me to 3.  that glue is hot people!!!  if you end up with more than you bargained for and it gets on your hands, it can really burn!  (Who would've thought... with a name like 'hot glue gun'.... duh!  Well I have to learn everything the hard way, don't I!  Lol)

Anyway, the end result was a glued on ribbon strip all the way around the boxes...  it did not look very neat, but it does, very definitely, look hand made!  (Unfortunately it looks hand made by my 3 year old instead of me, but hopefully they won't call DOCS on me for giving my boy a hot glue gun!! Lol)  Here is how they looked at this stage:
























After I had let the glue gun cool off, applied band aids to my hands and cleaned all the leaked strands and blobs of glue off everything, I set about the next task - labels.  I just got a painting that Alex recently brought home from Kindy and cut some little squares to fit the front of each box.  I then drew a rough border with a black permanent marker, and wrote "To Kay, Happy Easter, Love from Alex xxx" on the front.  Then I applied craft glue to the back and pasted it over the side of the box where the ribbon joined to conceal my clumsiness handiwork.  Then all that was left to do was fill it with a load of Cadbury chocolate eggs and seal it up.  And voila!























I also hit up my scrap booking stash again and put some Easter stickers I had hanging around on the top of the boxes to seal them - but I forgot to take photos of that bit!  D'oh!  Never mind, you can use your imaginations :)  Apologies for the blurry photos too...  I'm really not sure what happened there.

Stay tuned for more Easter fun soon - the Easter bunny has given me a sneak peak at what he's planning for Easter Sunday....  I'll be sharing that in the next couple of days!  I've been a bit sickly and run down lately, so I've been cooking a bit more often in an effort to eat some healthier foods and get myself back on track... the upside of this is that there are more recipes to come!  Boofy is also loving that he's been relieved of some of his cooking duties of late, although he's getting pretty sick of having to wait until I've taken photos of everything before he can eat!! Last night I was told I was 'out of control' with the cooked meal photos! Hahaha... 

Bye for now :)

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