Thankyou Gifts

It's almost time for the summer holidays and as the school year ends we begin to think of thank you gifts for teachers and support staff. There is a limit to the number of boxes of chocolates and bottles of bubble bath teachers can use so why not make a crafty gift - far more personal and it doesn't have to break the bank.

As a teacher myself I've been busy thinking of gifts to give to the Nursery Nurses and Teaching Assistants who work alongside me in my class. I always make some sort of crafty thing for them and this year I've come up with an idea to decorate glass jars and fill the jars with goodies. The local supermarket and chemist have got lots of mini bottles of shampoo, conditioner etc. for taking away on holidays for sale at the moment and I thought I could fill the jars with these.

My jars were bought in IKEA but you could always recycle pretty glass jars that you may have already.

All the jars are decorated using the same method. I cut patterned paper into strips and inked the edges with a chalk ink pad, on some of the strips I sewed along the edges on my sewing machine. One strip of paper wasn't quite long enough to wrap around my jars so I had to join two pieces together. I glued the paper to the jars using double sided tape.

I used recycled wooden packaging tags or made tags with a die cutting machine and decorated them using scraps of the same paper that I had wrapped around the glass jar, alphabet stickers, chipboard flowers, alphabet stamps and buttons.

I joined the tags to my jars by wrapping a co-ordinating ribbon around the neck of the jar and tying in a double knot, then threading both ends of the ribbon through the hole in my tag and tying in a bow.

With not a lot of imagination the jars could be used for anytime gifts for birthdays, Christmas, new baby births or just to say hello.

Have fun getting crafty this week and we aleays like to see what you've all been creating so please leave a link in the comments section.

Love Andrea x