A bear of a challenge

We all loved show & tell as a kid right? At my daughter's school, show & tell is a really big deal to the Kindergartner's. Two years ago when my son was in Kindergarten with the same teacher, I was introduced to the "Share Tub".

The Share Tub was a Costco sized Maxwell House coffee can with "SHARE TUB" written on the side in black sharpie. Each child got a turn to bring the can home and put something special inside. When they bring it back the next morning, they give the class clues and see who can guess what's inside.

When it was finally my sons turn to bring home the Share Tub, the teacher told me that if the Share Tub was "upgraded" when he returned it, she wouldn't mind. *wink wink*

The next morning, the coffee can had transformed into an adorable altered paint can. By the end of the first day, I had orders from all 5 of the other Kindergarten teachers.

Here I am two years later, and I make share tubs every year for the entire Kindergarten and 1st grade staff. Last year the teachers decided to pick a mascot for their classroom. So now, instead of just 5 share tubs to make each year, I get to have fun with a class theme for each one. I've got the frog class, the giraffe class, the penguin class, the dog class and the turtle class. I wish I had taken pictures of all the tubs I made, but time was short and I just needed to get them done!

Last week, the school hired a new Kindergarten teacher who wanted to order a share tub for her bear class. No problem right? I figured I'd stop at the scrapbook store on the way home from school, grab some cute bear paper and get to work.

Easier said than done! Apparently bear paper isn't so popular. I got so desperate that I would have even gone with Winnie the Pooh paper if I could have found it! After a week of searching, I finally found ONE SHEET of paper that I thought might work. It was a 12 x 12 sheet with a bunch of road sign images and three of them were bears.

Thank you Rusty Pickle!!Since I only had three small images to work with, I had to figure out a way to make it work. Luckily I had some brown paper with wildlife paw prints on it, so that became my background. The rest of the can was just put together with scraps. I chose some coordinating ribbon colors and tied lots to the side of each handle.
Yikes! Sorry for the long post. I've been sick for the last two days, and the only medicine we have in the house is NyQuil. I've been completely knocked out for the last several hours, so I guess I was feeling a little chatty tonight :-)

I'll be back tomorrow with some pictures from the Chihuly exhibit that we went to on Sunday in San Francisco. Until then...
hugs,