85 Days of Summer

Friday was the last day of school for the kiddos and yesterday began the 85 days they have off until school starts again in September (not that I'm counting or anything...). I've been trying to psych myself up for being on as Mama much more than I've grown used to and am determined to really engage with my kids. I want them to have a really great summer, which in theory will mean that I will have a better summer, too.

Lyric and his Great Kid award

Tigerlily receiving her Determination award

I've decided to start a weekly blog post to both chronicle our adventures this summer and keep myself honest and accountable to the plan I'm trying to hold to. Through the week I'll take photos of our adventures and do a weekend post of the highlights.

I'll also be adding a few more weekly standard posts in the hopes of posting daily. At the top of that list is offering tutorials, which has me really stumped. I can't seem to wrap my brain around how to do it! Luckily I've found a few tutorials on making tutorials that I'm hoping will help me. For now I will share this idea that I couldn't formulate into a tutorial--this year's gifts for my kids' teachers at the Free School: personalized tote bags!

It was a bit of a process to come up with this final product. It all began with the idea to give all 10 staff members at the school personalized "World's Best Teacher" mugs as a kind of joke but I couldn't find an affordable option for this. I then decided to make 6" embroidered hoops with this wording for each teacher. Here's what I came up with in Photoshop, with a ton of help from this video:
:The fonts I used are C rial and School Script Dashed (love dafont). I printed one of these designs out for all of the teachers and traced each with a layer of transfer paper between the printout and fabric. It worked wonderfully but it wasn't long before I realized that a.) the C rial font was a bit small to embroider easily, and b.) I might be able to finish all of the embroidery by the end of the next school year, but certainly not this one.

So, plan B. I realized I really love the School Script font and wanted to continue with that. I decided to make the embroidered names into patches and started thinking of something clever to affix them to. But when thinking about what that might be I had to remember that there are three male teachers, and as enlightened as they may be I wasn't sure I could imagine them rocking personalized zipper pouches (I'm dying to make some of these). I decided everyone uses tote bags and opted to make morsbags for everyone (I love this pattern but probably should have chosen something a bit more simple with the quantity needed and the time constraint I was facing). True to form I finished them up about an hour before graduation :)

I kept the guys' bags really simple and used up some larger pieces from my stash. All in all I think they were pretty successful, and appreciated. Now to make one for me...