Teacher Gift

Hey everyone! Short post today because I am ex-hausted. I'm sure you all are relieved that this won't be a post about incurable boils or water that turns to blood or some other of the Plagues that I seem to have been writing about the last few days. No, today we're going with a pencil vase that I put together as a Thanksgiving gift for the Girl's teacher. Here's a pic of the finished product so you can decide if you want to keep reading:

I keep going back to the well with this teacher gift; I think this is my third. Sometimes when I read blogs I wonder what came first, the crafty project or the blog. You know that there seem to be people who cook up craft projects just so they have something to blog about. Well, rest assured that this one pre-dates the blog by several years.

So, I think I may have a problem with the $1 area at Target. You could put a bin of empty cat food cans there and I would feel compelled to buy them. I was at Target for some other reason, but saw these packs of fall-themed pencils and bought about 8 packs (with 8 pencils per pack). Here's a picture of some of the pencils:

One has acorns, which reminds me that the Boy came home today with this major bruise-scrape thing on his side.

"How did you do that?" I asked.

"I fell."

"On what? The concrete?"

"Nah, on the acorns."  

Who knew that the squirrels were doing us a favor? Dang squirrels. Rats with better styling.

Anyway, the only other things you need for this project are a couple of rubber bands and an empty round plastic container like the ones that Crystal Light drink mix used to come in. They seem to have changed to a more oval-shaped container that I don't think would work. Our store brand of instant sugar-free lemonade still comes in the round container, so I went cheap on the drink mix and bought the Publix brand.

So, just put the rubber bands around the plastic container and use them to secure the pencils in place as you put them all around the container. See here:

I used the kind of rubber bands you would use in your hair, but you could use those "free" ones that they put around your strawberries at Whole Foods. The point is to secure them to the container without gluing the pencils so that the teacher can use the pencils in class. Here's another picture of the whole thing covered:

For some reason the pencils like being on an angle. No shame in that. Be who you are, pencils. The only other thing I did was to tape a little card on it to wish the Girl's teacher a Happy Thanksgiving. Oh, and I picked up some sunflowers at one of my umpteen visits to Publix this week and they look so happy in the vase. What's a vase without some flowers? Ta da! Finished product:

My friend, Steph mentioned that she had tried to make something similar with candy canes, to less success. I don't think you could do it the same way, because the candy canes would break unless you were really careful and I'm just not that careful. You could probably glue the candy canes, but then you couldn't eat them or turn them into peppermint dust, which this lady blogger claims has "fourteen bajillion uses." Hopefully one of the uses is the ability to fly. 

I'm going to leave you with one completely, totally unrelated picture just because it's funny:

Audrey the Moose has left the Girl a message. "I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!" That Audrey is not to be trifled with. I can only imagine what the Girl did to infuriate her so.

Hope you all have a great weekend!