For the last three years, I made word cloud tote bags for my kids' teachers as an end of year gift. This is a fantastic collaborative class gift that allows for easy participation for families.
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Sample Email to the Class
Here is the basic email I included to the other parents in my kids' classes. I included some sample word clouds photos so people could see what I was talking about.
We want to put a word cloud on a nice tote bag for each of the teachers. Can you please ask your kids to describe [TEACHER NAMES] and then email [PARENT] the results by [DATE]? Don't worry about full sentences, a list of words and/or phrases is fine.
Making the Word Cloud
As I received emails with descriptions from other families, I made a spreadsheed and copy and pasted the phrases. I made the word cloud on
wordart.com for free. You can copy all of the text you have collected and it will import words for you, counting how many times each word appears and elimiting common words. If you want multiple word phrases you will need to adjust those manually. (I try to keep track of any phrases separately.)
For formatting, I set the teacher name to be the largest size and default the angle to "0" so it will be horizontal. The other words will be sized based on how many times they appeared.
You can select any shape you want and customize the fonts that are used in the cloud. (For fonts I used "Headline One" for the name and then "Teen" for the rest of the words. I am including my layout settings for this particular word cloud, but you can play around with them to get something you want.
Under "Style" you can make the backdrop transparent. These word clouds come out adorbale whether you have a more crowded cloud with a lot of words or fewer words.
Last year, I downloaded the free lower resolution version of the file myself and turned it into a cuttable image for my cricut, but this year I paid $10 for 5 high resolution downloads - and I could download a SVG directly. This saved me a LOT of time inporting the image into Cricut design space. With the lower resolution file, any small words didn't import well as an image so I just typed the words out and replaced those area in cricut design space.
Cutting the file
I imported the SVG's into cricut design space and made my hearts 11.5" wide. At first the image looked like a black square - but there is a background border that you can turn off to see the design. I love that the SVG's have each idividual letter so if you accidently misspell something you can edit that before cutting.
I ironed the design onto
Navy Cotton Tote bags with my EZPress, but you absolutely could use a regular iron. These tote bags are inexpensive but not cheap feeling and would work well for groceries or books.
I finished up all 5 bags I wanted to create this year in one morning. Why did I pick tote bags? Personally, I feel like I can never have enough tote bags for groceries or quickly packing up extra items to send to school. I love how the word cloud project both personalizes the bags and allows the entire class to contribute. This also doesn't single out any famlies who are unable to contribute since it is a group effort.
Many years ago, I shared a fun end-of-year craft we did for teachers at our Preschool. This was a group project where kids decorated petals for each teacher and then we assembled them into flowers on folders. I adored this project, but as my kids get older it is hard logistically to both distribute and collect items for this kind of collaborative thank you gift.
Do you want to see more of my cricut projects? (As I type this question I realize that I now have comments off on the blog because of the high volume of spam - so I'll try to share some from time to time.)
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