The One with the Teacher Gifts

This year I decided to go the quick, easy route with the teacher gifts. We had 4 teachers this year, and I wanted something that would work for all of them.
I decided to buy cloth photo albums from Target, decorate them, then add pictures, journaling and embellishments as a "mini-album" of the school year.
For my youngest son, this was pretty easy, I had a ton of pictures because I'd be on his field trips and at his class parties. It was a bit more difficult with my 4th graders. They don't have as many photo opportunities. In the end, I created albums for their teachers that they could use for the next few years.
The cover was pretty simple.

On the inside, I created journaling cards and dividers using a simple Word template. I found a super cute poem about teachers on line and formatted it to match my journaling cards.

A few ribbons and some more flowers as embellishments and it was all finished.

Lessons learned from this project:
-Buy inexpensve albums as I find them throughout the year. I paid full price for these and while they weren't crazy expensive, I could have gotten a larger size for a similar price on sale at TJ Maxx or Tuesday Morning.
-Print photos throughout the year. I would have had a much better idea of the need for more photos for the 4th graders if I had been printing all along.
-Keep it simple-don't go to crazy with embellishments, it makes it hard to close. :)

Totally doing this again this year, the teachers seemed to love them. :)