Last minute Teacher gifts

One of our favorite teacher gifts is decorated flower pots.They are a nice simple gift, inexpensive and easy to make, and the kids have so much fun decorating and personalizing them. We fill them with  a variety of flowers or herbs.  Our flower pot gifts have come a long way. The first year that we made them, i just grabbed some markers and let my boy color all over the pots.  Turns out they were washable markers, and the minute we watered the plants, the drawings turned into an unrecognizable water color mess. 

Now we make our pots using (non-washable) acrylic paints, mod podge and stickers.

We start with a plain terracotta pot. Using acrylic paints my daughter added some green along the bottom for grass and painted the top rim.  We let the pain the dry, and then coated the entire thing in mod podge.

We found the awesome sticker books at Micheal's craft store.  

 After the mod podge dried my daughter decorated the pots with stickers. She had such a great time creating different scenes on the posts. We had a variety of gardening and fairy princess stickers. :)

Once she was finished creating her design, we coated it all in mod podge again.  This will seal the stickers on.  We just used a sharpie to write her  teacher's name on the pot, and i had her sign and date the bottom. 

After the mod podge dried, we filled the pots with potting soil and added our plants.  We made herb pots that contain parsley, thyme, basil, chives and dwarf lavender. i had also intended to add some mint and marjoram which i have have at our property, but forgot to dig it. They still look pretty good, and the herbs will fill in more as they grow.

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i tried to get a quick picture this morning but the lighting wasn't great so it's a bit blurry.  My daughter made the herb pots for her teacher and teacher's assistant.

My boy is technically in junior high now, so he has 4 teachers through out the day.  He wasn't as interested in decorating pots, so we put together these simple mug/flower sets.  i let him pick out the mugs for his teachers, and then he picked out a pack of flowers.  The flowers came in a 4 pack, so we transplanted them into disposable cups that fit perfectly inside each mug.  Then we cut squares of tissue paper to put in the mug, and placed the cup with the flower inside it. That way the flowers are easy to remove, by just lifting up the tissue paper and the teachers will be able to use the mugs if they want.

These would be neat with mint plants or chamomile or another favorite herb used for tea. Our gifts were pretty last minute...i always seem to run out of time, but you could create some neat themes with them.

The kids enjoyed putting them together and loved handing them to each of their teachers!

We have an end of the year field trip today, awards day/half day tomorrow...then school is out!  Still trying to get my garden in and be moved into the RV this weekend.  We now have working electricity, still working on the water though... :)