Teacher Appreciation

I'm sure you've all heard it's teacher appreciation week, and let's face it, teacher's have a tough job and get little credit for the importance of the work they do. So I wanted to do something for my son's teacher.

And I saw the cutest idea at Making Memories...

I went to the local coffeehouse. I picked a smaller chain that was closest to the school.

Gratuitous picture of coffee shop thanks to Google Earth.

When I purchased my gift card I just asked for a cup and a lid. They were happy to let me have it.

I filled out the info on the card and stuck it in the cup. Popped the lid on and then got to work on the computer.

First I went to stock.xchng which is a free stock photo site. You must sign up to use it and agree that if you post photos to the site, others may use them for free. I searched "coffee" and selected an image of coffee beans and an image of coffee stained paper.

I opened the coffee beans in Photoshop Elements and selected the white background and deleted it.

Then I opened the coffee stained paper, check what the image size was, went back to the beans and made that image size match the stained paper. I added the beans to a new layer on the stained paper image.

Then I had to clean up the edges a bit. The white around some beans at the bottom just didn't blend.

So I selected beans and inversed the selection so I could erase the white only.

I then added text that said, "Just wanted to Espresso my thanks for being a great teacher."

Once I had printed the image on card stock, I trimmed it, had my son sign it, and used a ribbon to tie it to the cup. If you would like the PDF of this image, send me an email and I'm happy to send it to you.

It's a just a little something. But I thought it was fun and clever. I know she is going to like it because I know she likes coffee!

[Didn't really mean for this to be an actual Photoshop Elements tutorial, so this is missing some explanations. I just wanted to encourage you to use your computer as a tool to make the gift you want to give. If you want this image, send me a message and you can have it. I'll email you the PDF.]

Linking to great Wednesday parties.
And a new (for me) Link party: