Mrs. M.'s Garden

 

Tomorrow is the last day of the school year and in the weeks leading up to this day, I have given many thoughts about my gift to Mrs. M., the twins' 1st Grade teacher. I could make her a slideshow on a dvd with pictures of the past year of all the kids from the class, just like I did for Mrs. E last year. But then I recall that Mrs. E was so moved by it that she had to choke back her tears and was not able to talk to me after she watched the show. Although I was flattered that my work evoked such strong emotions, it was not quite the reaction I was expecting. Then I thought I could make Mrs. M. a wall art using crayons to spell out her initials. I've seen that on many blogs and have always wanted to make one of those. But then I chanced upon this book:

In case you are not familiar with it, Mrs Spitzers' Garden by Edith Pattou is about a teacher who tends to her garden where the flowers are actually her students. It is a metaphoric but lovely story and it gave me the idea for what to give to my kids' teacher this year.

The first thing that I bought specifically for this project is this pair of Martha Stewart fringe scissors. Except for a rock garden, every garden has grass, right? Forget the fact that I've always wanted this but had no excuse to buy it. Now I can justify the purchase!

Next, I got a metal bucket ($2.50) from Target and about 5 lbs of split green peas ($0.49/lb) from the grocery store.

Using the Walk in My Garden cartridge, I start cutting out flowers in different shapes and sizes. But when the time came to hot-glue them to the top of the pencils, I hit a snag. You know how it is when you need a fork and all you can find are spoons? Well, I needed regular pencils that has a green body and all I could find are the yellow ones. A yellow sunflower does not look so good on a yellow stem. Ack! So I start my hunt for green regular pencils.

Thankfully, my search did not take long. I found these Papermate Earth Wise pencils that comes 10 to a pack for about $2 at the grocery store nearby. Whoa hoo! I bought them and got right back to work.

A bit of hot glue here and a blob of hot glue there, and this is what I ended up with:

I made a total of 25 flower tops for pens and pencils to represent all 25 kids in the class. But I also got Mrs. M. a gift card. How should I stick that in? I decided to do it this way:

Okay, Mommy can't be the one who does all the work. So Mean Mom got the girls to draw and cut out (By hand! No Cricut! Muahhahaha!) some butterflies and I attached them to the pencils with wire. 

 

I can't give a present without including a card so I also made Mrs. M one and I will get all the kids in the class to sign on it before I give it to her. This is how the card looks like on the outside and on the inside:

 Now the "garden" is almost done but something seems to be missing:

I know! How about adding this little fellow?

The 3" snail  from the Create-A-Critter cartridge is perfect for dressing up the roll of sticky tape. Isn't he the cutest thing? I even found matching erasers from a pack that I bought from Target a while ago.

 A little bit of rearranging later, and my gift is finished. 

May I present to you....Mrs. M.'s Garden: