:: Each Friday in May, I am posting a Teacher’s gift for $1! Make sure to check back and see what I make! :: 

School is almost out, and it’s time to start thinking about teacher gifts.  I know not everyone does them because of time and cost, but these 4 gifts are really, really easy and cheap to do and I think teacher’s need a little appreciation.  I substitute taught for 2 years and wow, I will tell you, that is a demanding job. I polled all of my teacher friends and asked them what they recieved most often, and the answer was candles and lotions.

My own Mother in law has an entire cupboard at home and school full of candles and lotions.  She sends me shopping there every time I visit and I love it.  But going beyond the normal gifts, my teacher friends suggested things that can be used, don’t take up much room, or are edible.  The first homemade teacher gift is this cute pencil vase!

I saw a similar one on Pinterest, but decided to put my own spin.  I have a TON of pencils from last year’s CVS deal where they were practically giving them away. I got five packages for free.  I purchased the skinny vase at Dollar Tree for $1.  You could cut the cost and be extra frugal by using a recycled veggie can.  Or use a glass cup that your kids broke all the matching ones to.  You choose.  I went with the skinny vase cause I thought it was cute.

Now, you can hot glue the pencils to the vase if you wanted, but doing it this way means the teacher can reuse these pencils!  I grabbed half the pencils and secured the pencils to the vase with a rubber band.

Then I did the same thing with the other half of the pencils.  Super easy.  You can add more or take away pencils as needed.   And that’s pretty much it!  It’s really that simple.  Crazy, huh?

To finish it off I grabbed a big, fat ribbon from the bag of ribbons I’ve been collecting over the years and tied it to the vase to cover the rubber bands.  Since I won’t be giving this away just yet, I used a fake flower that I had on hand.

So what is the final cost?The ribbon, pencils, rubber bands and flower are all things I already had on hand so my total cost was $1 for this pencil vase.  I could have even cut that cost by using a can, but I liked the vase.  If you had to buy all of these things new, it would still only cost around $2-$3 dollars.  You can pick flowers from your own garden, buy a small boquet fr om the Dollar Tree, or buy fresh flowers for as low as $4.  You have the option to make the flowers as expensive or inexpensive as you want.   If you don’t have pencils but have tons of markers, you could use those instead!  Get creative

Happy crafting!