DIY Teacher Appreciation Mugs

It’s the end of the school year already!  How in the heck did that happen?  At our house, that meant a quick trip to the dollar store for supplies to make our wonderful teachers some silly, cutsey gifts.

I drew little sillies on the mugs in sharpie and baked them at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, then let them cool overnight in the oven so the sharpie would set into the glaze.  This has worked great for me on dollar store mugs in the past, but not on nicer mugs that I found at Home Goods.

Each teacher’s name was written on one side, and on the rest of the mug, we included pop-culture memories from the 2013-2014 school year.

We included a reference to “What Does the Fox Say?” with a simple cartoon that I practiced on a piece of paper first.  Here you can also see where we wrote “Love, Cora” (or Chloe) in the handle area so they would know who its’ from and details for the school year under the handle.

I also created a reference to the Miley Cyrus fiasco and did a Bing image search (Google & I aren’t really speaking at the moment, but I did include YouTube links here) for help on how to draw a caricature of Miley and added her name since I didn’t think it was that obvious just from my novice artwork.

We could’t ignore the “Keep Calm and…” + Royal Baby reference!

As much as I hated to give them the attention, I had to poke fun at Kimye!

And last but definitely not least, what would a 2013-2014 memory mug be without a Frozen reference?  Since my drawing skills are somewhat seriously lacking, I opted to sketch Olaf from another image search rather than attempt Anna and/or Elsa.

To add a bit of color, I also embroidered some hand towels last minute.  Partly because I wanted to try embroidering towels before I try it on our nice ones ;-).

The girls also drew some of their own artwork on Thank You notes which I later wrote in.

I love how these turned out and so did the teachers!

This is also a great gift for dance, gymnastics, soccer, or other coaches.

I did a similar projects with glitter if you’d like some more information.  Read about them here!