no more teacher's dirty looks

At least, I hope not... It's that time of year again, when I sweat the gifts for the teachers and the bus drivers and all the other various and sundry people who put up with my children on a daily basis for ten months of the year. This is yet another reason for you homeschoolers to feel grateful for what you do: one less thing to worry about right now! If you just treat yourself to a mani/pedi then you have covered the bases in teacher appreciation and time away for yourself in one fell swoop.

But for the rest of us, there is this need to come up with a little something. Even if I contribute to the class gift, I still feel like I have to give a little something! Yes, I must learn at some point to just let the heck go but we already knew that.

My solution this year is knitted bookmarks, very loosely based on this pattern. If I was just a bit more organized and forward-thinking and had oodles of spare time then I could have knit them all a beautiful shawlette or something, but I am not so I did not. Plus did I mention there are four of them?

Terzo's class spent the last two months studying insects in great detail, so we made this one for his kindergarten teacher.

I say "we" because he was most insistent on knitting a few stitches himself, and choosing the exact placement of the second button, which he also insisted on. I thought we could have done with just the one, because the leaves -- based on the "just a leaf" pattern available on ravelry-- are so simple and elegant all by themselves.

Here it is without the book, so you can get a better idea of how it works and how simple it is. It reminds me of a thneed from "The Lorax": it could be a bookmark! a necklace! a hair band! a bicycle seat cover! Well, OK, maybe not the last one.

Secondo's teachers call him "dawg" for reasons known only to them, so I changed the leaves into bones (yes, they are bones, not peanuts) and customized the button to fit that theme. Bit of trivia: there are a lot of cat buttons out there, but the choices in dog buttons are very limited. Not sure what that says about people who use novelty buttons.

I hope the teachers like them, and find them somewhat useful, so I can avoid those dirty looks.

I still don't have a solution for the bus drivers, though.