Thank-you gifts

Back in December Jack finished his first year of school. He had a great year, and I was lucky enough to be able to volunteer in the classroom for one day a week, most of the year. We wanted to do something as a thank-you to his teachers, and as there were two part-time teachers and a teacher's aide, we needed three.

I feel pretty strongly that a thank-you gift for a teacher should come from the child, so we had a think about it and Jack wanted to make something with fabric from my stash which was fine by me. We decided on a cushion for the main teacher and pencil cases for the others (I only had one cushion insert handy).

We found some fabric dye crayons at a local craft shop and some cream fabric, jelly roll strips and a bag of bright scraps in the stash and set to work.

Artist at work

The first step was to draw on some squares of cream fabric. I taped the fabric to some cardboard to stop it shifting, wrote the names on a bit of paper for him to copy and left him to it. The names were my suggestion but Jack decided on the rest. He drew a picture of each teacher surrounded by flowers and love hearts.


I love how each teacher is drawn with a big heart taking up most of their body

 The next day Jack picked out fabrics to frame each drawing and then sat on my lap to sew them together. By this stage he was running out of steam, and a bit bored by all the pressing going on, so he picked out fabrics for the backs and found something else to do.

He was particularly adamant that the two pencil cases needed to have the spider fabrics on the back "cause that will freak them out, Mum". Charming child.



Photobombing

The pencil cases turned out much larger than intended, but that may just make them more useful? The cushion cover was all jelly roll strips, so was easy to put together. I made an envelope back with a velcro closure, and really loved the way it turned out. (Jack's Dad even liked it enough to request we make some for his family for Christmas. We made two but forgot to take photos. The picture Jack is drawing in the photo at the top of the post is one of these.)

We finished off the gifts with cards Jack made by drawing a Christmas tree on the front of a pre-cut blank card. He wrote his own message to each teacher inside the card and I so wish I had taken a picture of them to put in his scrapbook.

The only thing I purchased specifically to make these gifts was the set of fabric crayons, everything else was from the stash so they weren't expensive but there was quite a bit of time and effort from both of us to create them. The look of pride on his face when he carted them off to school was more than worth it.