Treasures 4 Teachers Adventure

We have this cool place called Treasures 4 Teachers in Arizona where teachers who have a membership can go get lots of great stuff for their classroom either really, really cheap or for free. All of the items their have been donated and you never know what you'll find but it's like and art teachers dream. I have had several project ideas in mind but always thought I'd never be able to save up enough supplies for an entire grade level and then I found Treasures 4 Teachers. :) (I see about 650 kids a week so I plan to have about 150 of each item that I use for a project.)

This year I got really lucky when Treasures 4 Teachers received a grant and was able to give 50 free memberships to teachers in schools who received 301 money from the government. (I will of course have to renew my membership when it expires because this place is that good!)

My mom and I went last Thursday and I found so much great stuff! I got about 100 desk calendars for the kids to use as glue mats (It will be so much easier to grab a calendar to glue on and just rip of the page when it is too gluey that what we were doing before!), tons of metal robot supplies, loads of great stuff for printing including tons of plastic lids in lots of sizes (Yea, I don't have to save them all summer!), a bunch of labels for the kids to use to make stickers, oh I could go on forever. LOL! The shopping trip was fun and the sorting at home was fun too but next time I will take my Zip lock bags with me and have things sorted from get go. :) Here is some of the loot.

Double Double

My mom had a small class at her house on Sunday to make the Double Double book. She taught this class twice at Frenzy Stamper and I missed it both times so I was happy I could make it to class yesterday. If you look closely you might notice a few skulls. LOL!

Cleaning The Studio

Cleaning my studio is never as easy a task as it sounds like it will be. Granted I had a mountain of art supplies on my desk and had been putting off cleaning it for weeks. Maybe I should have taken a picture but if you are an artist you are all too familiar with what it looked like.

I can never just put things away it is a little bit like If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. If your desk is covered with Cricut cartridges you will have to rearrange your bookshelf, rearranging your bookshelf will remind you of all the great books you have been collecting so of course you will have to flip through a few of them, flipping through the books will remind you that a friend of yours told you about an online book exchange, which of course will lead you to your computer for a good hour of messing around, before you again remember that your task was to clean off your desk. :) Maybe I should get back to the desk. LOL!

I Should Have Mentioned This Earlier

My mom found this really great Etsy shop and website called Pretty Little Studio. After my mom blogged about how cute the site was Melissa, the seller, offered a 10% discount to the readers of my mom's blog. When I arrived home on Wednesday my goodies were waiting for me and they are fabulous!


If you are interested in checking out Pretty Little Studio you can still get 10% off your order until the end of the month if you read my mom's blog :) and enter the code janeeileen10 when you check out. I think I am going to double check that I got everything that I "needed" right now.

Running, Running

I can hardly believe that school had already been out for two weeks, I feel like I have been running the whole time.



Mom and I went on our yearly CA shopping trip with Kelly from Monday until late night Wednesday. We had lots of fun shopping and goofing around and I even experienced my first earthquake!

I had to be to work by 7:00 on Thursday but am now officially done with summer work until late July. (Of course that doesn't mean I won't be spending time reading professional books, planning for next year, and working on documents for the district office. A little secret is that teachers actually work a lot of the summer, just not with kids. LOL!)


Today I had a fun art date with Ayesha, Jessica, and Barb. We were arting with our sewing machines and I proved to myself that I am my mother's daughter and played the role of sewing machine whisperer with Ayesha's machine. :)

I think at one time or another all of our machines gave us grief even mine!


This evening I went to Val's jewelry party and tomorrow I have Jack's Second Annual Weennie Roast (a.k.a. birthday party). Things have been busy and fun here. I hope to get a chance to clean up around my studio tomorrow. I have bags of art supplies sitting about from classes, trips, and art adventures. Creating clean surfaces actually sounds fun!

Hey!

I didn't even make it to airport security with my inky fingers. They stopped me on the way to the security line to swab my fingers with a little white cloth that they examined under some fancy light. LOL!

So , you may have noticed that I never actually got to post an up date while I was away. :) My conference was in Las Vegas and as you can imagine time slipped away quickly! (Plus our conference was from 7:30 ish to 3:00 ish each day so we actually had some place to be a lot of the time.) I can honestly say that the conference was career changing. If you speak PLC I'd love to tell you all about it! I actually started putting what I learned to use on Thursday writing Art Common Assessments at work.

Yesterday while hanging out with my mom for her birthday I got a chance to work a little more on my book from Dina's class last weekend. I've got to throw you a bone and give you a peek.


I also took another one of her classes, Masterful Art Journaling, at Creative Quest last night.

With all of this running I have big plans to rest up this weekend, and by rest up I mean rest and help Jim get things ready for his business trip next week. I've got anothe rbig adventure planned on Monday. :) Things will be busy for a while still.

Just Checking In

Mom and I took a fun class, Graffiti Of My Life, yesterday with Dina Wakley at Creative Quest. I am not quite done with my book completely but will show it once I get the journaling and decorations added in.

I am walking out the door to the airport headed to a conference for work. (With day 2 spray ink fingers :) I am armed with my camera and Jim's netbook so hopefully I won't be MIA for long. I am also taking along my journals and pens. I need to journal on tons of done collages so hopefully I'll get a little of my own "work" done while I'm away too!

What Up?

School for me is out on Friday. I am done with kids at 9:00. My 4th graders will be bowling during art time on the last day of school. I am about 1/2 way done cleaning and getting things closed up for the summer in the studio. All of this means my brain will be returning to normal soon. :)

I did absolutely nothing this weekend aside from watching all of my TiVoed shows and a billion hours in movies. I did manage to get together with Buffy and the girls ton Monday and that was lots of fun too. :)


I finally made the cute mini paper airplane garland that I linked to a few weeks ago. I used paper though instead of fabric and I love it. I actually made a practice on first and hung it in the kitchen just to get it out of the way but can't seem to take it down it is so cute. The real one was made to add to the othe little flag garland in my studio. I don't know why but this garland just says summer to me and I love it!

I should also mention that I got my copy of Somerset Studio Gallery and love my article! They photographed so many of the pages in my journal to put along with the article. It is just yummy! It makes me want to hold the journal in my hands again. LOL!