Baskets!

Remember, as always you can click on the photos to enlarge them for your viewing. I choose to load smaller pictures so the page itself loads quicker.

I have a couple baskets to share tonight. You may, or may not know, that I used to own a gift basket business. Well, I still have a lot of inventory and one of my friends asked me if I could put together a basket for the new principal at the school (school starts tomorrow). So this is what I came up with. I meant to take a picture before I wrapped it so you could see it better...but I forgot to do that. The basket is a pampering basket and contains a cotton wrap, slippers, pedicure set, eye mask, lotion, bath "tea" (something to soak in the bathtub with), some brushes, a relaxing CD, a washcloth, and an actual tea to relax with afterwards. This would have retailed for about $100 - but I sold it to her at my cost (or maybe below) so she got a great deal at $40 and I was able to reclaim just a little space in my house! I told my hubby he can deposit the check into our bank to help cover my budget "overage" from yesterday's rubber stamping expo. His response was, "I'm not even going to ask." LOL.



The second basket shows some items you've seen before. This is one (of the two) teacher baskets for tomorrow's first day of school. They are complete (other than I suppose I should make a tag or a card so they know who they are from and why!) I added ribbon to the journals, added little white boards (write on, wipe off) that I got at the $ store...I stamped "Notes" and a little flower under it on each one and added ribbons to the handle, the notecards and pen that were posted previously, and then I wrapped and decorated a candy bar. Here's one of the completed baskets.



Tomorrow is the first day of school. The boys are in the bath. Their clothes are all washed and put away. Their backpacks are filled with all their back-to-school supplies. The lunchboxes are waiting in the kitchen. I hope they both enjoy school this year. Mario has never really liked school. His favorite year was 2nd grade...but literally almost every morning he whines and complains and doesn't want to go. (Even in Kindergarten and 1st...the FUN years!) Dakota is the opposite...he's excited and LOVES school. I really think it has to do with how difficult things are for Mario. Due to his prematurity he still has issues with fine motor skills so writing is very difficult for him. They believe he is also ADD. He's mainstream classroom - but goes to special ed for math and reading. What's frustrating is that he really IS intelligent - but it doesn't translate to the book learning. I believe some day he will be a technology genius of some sort.

Ok, Mother Hen needs to go get them out of the bath, fed dinner and into bed before midnight! LOL. Really I'm shooting for 9:00.

Jane

Beginning of Teacher Gifts

First, on a non-stamping related comment...I did hear back from one of the places I interviewed. They have chosen someone else. Sigh. Oh well...next number. ;-)

Today I started working on the beginning of year teacher gifts. I'd bought a couple journals at the $1 store and planned on covering them and making a matching pen, a matching chocolate bar, and maybe a post-it note holder and pen.

So first I started with the journals. Here they are mostly completed...I am thinking of tying ribbons to the binding just to make them prettier but I haven't decided yet. Me and ribbon don't always get along. I think my use of ribbon usually looks dorky. I like how these turned out so far though! The paper is from a pack I bought at Michael's. The only stamp used is the flower and it's from Personal Impressions by Inkadinkado. I'll show the set in a minute. The NOTES are made with Sizzix alphabet dies. The flowers may look like paper flowers...but they are actually just fake flowers from the $1 store with the ends clipped off and then a mini brad through the center.

Here are the two journals with their matching pens.



Here is the stamp set I used and a set of notecards that came from the same company. I didn't know it, but the envelopes for the cards are also preprinted to match the cards. They are very cool! (And I won them as blog candy from someone else's blog...so they were FREE which made them even cooler!)



After making the journals I decided I'd use the cards shown in the package above to make notecards to go with the journals. So I used the outer circle stamp and stamped it on each card and then used my alphabet stamps from CTMH and stamped four "N"s and four "L"s. I had bought some clear boxes at cdstamps.com so I'll be using those to package them up. These were SUPER SIMPLE. I may think of these again at the holidays!



I also made some candy bar covers but will have to wait until I have the actual candy bar to wrap so it looks better. Right now it's just a piece of paper cut to size and decorated.

Still MAY do the post-it note holders. Haven't decided yet. School starts on Monday so I'm running out of time!

Have a great evening! I have another halloween item to share tomorrow so come back and visit!

Jane