Little Dash: Teacher Appreciation

Dash was so incredibly blessed to have an amazing, caring, effective first grade teacher this year. So when our room mom sent out an email asking for help with gifts for teacher appreciation week, I couldn't raise my hand fast enough.

The way our class is doing it this year is fairly simple--the room mom asked for monetary donations, then I took those donations and shopped my ass off. (I may have gone slightly overboard.) (I really, really like his teacher.)

The first "theme" day is Stationery. I had absolutely no clue where to start, so I ended up just buying a bunch of adorable things that I decided could work in her home or in the classroom.

The amount of affordable, irresistible stuff that's available made me squee. I honestly wanted to keep almost everything. But I didn't. Because I'm selfless. Also because that would be stealing.

I wanted to add a couple of handmade touches for the stationery gift, as well. So I printed up some bookplates on large label sheets and cut them down to size.

And I broke out my trusty padding compound to make a few coordinated note pads. I'm not showing the packaging on the stationery gift because another mom is taking care of that part. I'll try to get a picture when she delivers it to the classroom.

The next theme day is Favorite Things. Except she wouldn't tell us any of her favorite things. Because "anything would be fine, really." Well.

So I decided to do a "Welcome to Summer" relaxation kit. I included a good book, a gorgeous Vera for Target scarf, a cute pair of flowered sunnies, some smooshy padded Dearfoam flip flops, the world's yummiest sunscreen, some fun plastic tumblers and reusable ice balls, and a few hippy-dippy bath items.

I loaded everything into this sweet chevron beach tote...

And added a festive tag. I really love this gift and hope it's a fun to use as it was to put together.

OK. Now's where the real crazy starts to reveal itself. The third day of gift-giving involves a way to display all the gift cards donated to our sweet teacher by the students. At Christmas I made an adorable (if I may say so myself) clothespin wreath, and I wanted to top myself this year.

I got it into my head that I wanted to involve lemons somehow. They're just so bright and Summery and make me feel vacationy. So. I printed out some cute illustrations of lemons onto card stock, cut them out & taped them onto the gift cards.

Then I made a lemonade recipe card, a tag identifying what the gift actually is, plus a little note thanking her for a "cool & sweet year." Get it? Cool & sweet? Like lemonade?