To Remember Her By

Willow's favorite teacher won't be returning to Montessori next year. In a school in which classrooms encompass three "grades", transitions out of the class are a big deal. Graduating kindergarteners will be honored in an intimate ceremony on the last day of class (Montessori is big into ceremonies, I think you might have gathered), and I think the students are also preparing a different sort of celebration to honor their departing teacher.

As part of that, we parents were given a 12"x12" piece of scrapbook paper and asked to make a page with our child to present to the teacher at the ceremony. So in between breakfast (peanut butter sandwiches and watermelon, prepared and eaten and cleaned up after completely by delighted little girls, who think that being in charge of their own breakfast is the height of grown-up luxury) and laundry and goofing around (the girls with bubbles and Dinosaur Bingo; me with Awkward Family Photos--I'm totally going to submit some from my own childhood) and lunch (me this time, maximizing the usage of the peanut butter and bread demolished in the making of breakfast) and drawing out on the back deck and bullying Willow through getting ready for school (only two more days, I told her, and then yes, you can wear your shorts without panties), the girls and I made this scrapbook page for Willow's sweet teacher:
It looks a little funky where I awkwardly stitched two separate scans together in Photoshop (whenever my scanner finally craps out--and it has lasted FOREVER--I am buying the scanner with the largest scanning bed that will fit in my house), and the color scheme scanned a little strange (Is the scanner starting to crap out, I wonder?), but it's a pretty accurate estimation overall.

The photo mats are some pieces of upholstery remnant that I had cut and sewn to be coasters, but I didn't like them and threw them in the scrap pile. The photos themselves, and Willow's name, are printed on a sheet of printable fabric--I didn't use my Bubble Jet Set because it takes some time to soak and air-dry, and I was, of course, over deadline with this page. Nifty little trick--super-saturate your print job when you print on fabric, because the fabric sucks up so much ink that otherwise your photos will come out a lot lighter than you'd intended.

Willow drew and decorated the hearts with Sharpies on brown paper bag, and then I cut them out (oh, the tragic cutting of lefties! While the girls were drawing on the brown paper, I actually drew and cut out some practice cutting pages for them--I'll show you those some other time, because they're neat-o) and hand-stitched them on with buttons and red thread. Will also put her handprint, done in brown acrylic paint, on the bottom right upholstery mat, and then I machine-stitched the upholstery mats to the scrapbook page and the fabric photo prints to the upholstery mats. Done and done.

Now for end-of-the-year gifts for all three teachers...