Teacher Gifts on a Budget

If you have children, I have a feeling you're gonna like this post. I have two school aged children and one in Mother's Day Out as of this year. That brings my grand total to 7 teachers between all of my little ones. If you are like me, budgeting has become a necessity in this day and age. I made teacher gifts this year that are pretty unique, don't include 5,000 calories, and can be enjoyed for years to come for the low price of $5 plus some change...total. Now you're curious huh? Well, here it is:

You wanna do this too? Yeah, I thought you might. So I'll tell you how so you can...that is unless you have a child in one of my children's classes and then, well, sorry :)

I first got the idea from a wonderful blog called The Idea Room. I have her linked over to the side under "other creative blogs" as well. She is full of great ideas that are great for my wallet. I mean, one person should seriously not be so creative. It's just not right :)

So, I expanded on her idea and made a little goody box complete with a hand towel and hand sanitizer. I happened to have these waffle weave kitchen towels that I got for around $3 each from Embroider This. You can also find great waffle weave Kitchen towels at Walmart that come in a 2 pack for $3.50...an even better deal. I picked an easy applique seeing as I was doing 7 of them. This simple zig zag cross has only 3 steps and is done in a flash! Turns out super cute too, see?

You can get instructions for how to make your personalized hand sanitizer here. I got the hand sanitizer from The Dollar Store and printed the "hand in hand" document at Fed Ex Kinko's for .75 cents per transparency page. I will say that she has you put your transparency paper in an empty bottle. That was just too much trouble for me having to figure out how to get all that hand sanitizer back in the bottle, so I just did it while the sanitizer was still inside the bottle. I used the handle of a wooden spoon to push the transparency paper up against the front of the inside of the bottle and it worked like a charm. Then I found some Christmasy ribbon in my gigantic unorganized craft bin (I really need to work on that) and VOILA!
Oh yeah...the cute little box...where did that come from you ask? Target's dollar bin. Yep. Love me some Target. So there you have it:

Hand Sanitizer-$1.00
Hand in Hand transparency label-0.75 cents per page (I put 2 "labels" on a page...could have put more but they charged extra to digitize all that-good grief?!?!)
Kitchen Towel-$3.00 roughly
Box- $1.00

I don't know about you, but my budget is saying thank you, Candice. And I'm loving this gift. Hopefully, all my (and your) children's teachers do to! Teachers are amazing people and I am so grateful for ours! Truly, they are one in a million! Merry Christmas!!