For Arnie...

This is an altered gift I made for my kids' bus driver, Arnie. He has been driving the bus for many years and told me that he was retiring after this school year. My kids have only had him for two years since they both just started school full-time and I was saddened by the news.

So, I decided to make him this custom tumbler gift set for Christmas. I bought several of these from Mike's several years ago and found an excuse to finally use them (can you say "What a hoarder?"...Yes, I admit I am!) I had this stamp set from Club Stamp Academy called Sheer Genius that had never been inked. I love all of the images from this set and used the silhouette bus stamp which reminds me of a Thomas Kinkade stamp.The first picture below is the whole gift set: one tumbler, matching card, 2 packets of ground coffee purchased at Target, and homemade wheat bread.

Here is  close-up of the  mug you can see the detail...I traced the template on patterned paper and sewed it together with the piece of paper that came in with the tumbler for more stability. I stamped the image on textured vanilla cardstock. And even with the textured cardstock, you can see the detail very clearly. I customized the tumbler with his name. It was very hard to stamp his name in a straight line using wooden alpha stamps. I used twine to tie the tag onto the template. I was lucky that everything fit inside the tumbler once I was done.

And here is the close-up of the matching card - very simply made. I can't seem to find the stamp set I used for this one so I will post the name of it later on when I do find it. I did a little stitching on the card as well.

As you can see, I decided to use non-traditional Christmas colors because I wanted Arnie to be able to use his tumbler throughout the year.

That is it for now..working on some other things and will come back soon!

Thanks for stopping by!