I'm here! Just pregnant!

Nope, haven't dropped off the face of the earth! But I am 5 weeks from delivery and recovering from a nasty sinus infection so...things have been interesting. But I did want to share this little project with you!

Tomorrow is the last day of school for us here, so I was working on some end-of-year gifts for teachers.  My son's teacher has had a particularly difficult year with her class (she had 27 kids and about 9 of them were troublemakers- my son not included!) so I thought this would be an appropriate sentiment for her.

I pretty much just copied the "Keep Calm" posters I'd seen out there and found a similar font, then worked with it on my computer until I liked how it looked. I just used free clipart for the book image, and then I printed it out on plain paper to see how it looked and make sure it would fit correctly on my dictionary page.

Then I took my dictionary page- the one with the definition for "teacher" on it- from an old dictionary and I centered it over the printout on the plain sheet of paper. (I held the dictionary sheet up to the light so I could see the wording on the plain sheet behind it and get it lined up correctly.) Next, I used scotch tape to secure it- I used just a thin edge of the tape on the edge of the dictionary page, leaving most of the tape attached to the plain printer paper. That way it would feed through the printer without getting jammed and, if the tape was difficult to remove from the dictionary page I could just trim off that little edge with my paper trimmer. A word of caution: make sure you know which way text will print on your paper before feeding it into your printer- you don't want to end up wrecking your chosen dictionary page with upside-down text!! I will sometimes draw a little arrow for myself on my test sheet to remind me which way I put it in. :-)

Once my words were printed on my dictionary page, I mounted it with glue dots onto a piece of patterned scrapbook paper (like a mat) and put it into my thrift store frame. The whole project cost less than a dollar and turned out quite nicely!

Did you do any crafty/thrifty projects for your kids' teachers this year? Leave a comment and share! (I always need new ideas for next year!)