Saturday 24 October 2015

Just treats please!

My heart loves the excitement of kids dressing up and exploring their communities door to door for delicious treats, & my sweet tooth loves leftover candy! Needless to say, Halloween has always been a favourite holiday of mine, & this year I have created some special mason jar goodies for the adorable kiddies in my life, both young and those young at heart.




Simply purchase any size mason jar from a store of your choice, some halloween themed or coloured ribbon, twine, or yarn depending on your personal preference, print these fabBOOlous gift tags for free, and fill with delicious treats of your choice!



The freebie also has this adorable tag, and a simple Happy Halloween one as well, with a spider web graphic created by the wonderful Laura Strickland of My Cute Graphics.

Wishing everyone a fun and safe Halloween! Please tag @ms.elizabeth.a or #mselizabetha on Instagram to share your own spooktacular creations.

Sunday 18 October 2015

For the love of DIYs & babies.

As much as I love creating for teaching, I also love all things stationery. I am so excited to let you all know that soon I will be opening a Ms. Elizabeth A. Etsy shop to share many of my stationery designs with you! To help celebrate this exciting news, I want to share a few temporary freebies, enjoy!

This past weekend I enjoyed creating adorable tags and tickets for the easiest (& most delicious) baby shower game that I am so happy to share with you!

First, you must find an adorable jar, maybe you have one around your house, or you may have to buy one like I did. I used a large mason jar from Michael's to suit the rustic & simplistic style of our wonderful mama to be, and it only cost $2.50, as it was originally $4.99, but I used a 50% off coupon - yay for discounts!

Once you have your jar, you get to make the sweetest of decisions and decide what type of candy or candies you would like to fill your jar with. I originally wanted to do Cadbury mini-eggs, because I absolutely love their pastel colours, however for some reason finding the large bags of them was harder than I thought and therefore I went with delicious Hershey hugs & kisses! While filling your jar make sure to count how many candies are placed inside as this will be the number your guests will have to guess to win! If no one guesses the correct number, the guest with the closest number, wins the beautiful jar of candy!

For added charm, and to better fit the feel of the festivities I tied the rim with twine I purchased at the Dollar Tree for $1.15, and a cute kraft tag to let guests know what it is they need to do to play. I also created pretty-in-pink guess tickets to celebrate the baby girl without going pink overboard. A simple kraft gift bag was used to collect the guesses, which was also purchased at the Dollar Tree for $1.15 (for 3 bags!).

You can of course print these tags and tickets on any colour you wish, card stock paper works best for durability! Please share your games & prints with me through Instagram: @ms.elizabeth.ca or #mselizabetha as I would LOVE to see what you do!

Sunday 13 September 2015

Tidy Desk DIY.

Sundays are for comfort food and your favourite pastime; reading, planning, watching football, or in my case (for today) a classroom DIY. After a quick run to my local dollar stores (Dollarama and Dollar Tree) I decided to make these adorable boxes to help keep my desk clutter free as much as possible this year. It is so easy to let our desks get covered up by paperwork and random nicknacks. So to those loose paper clips, post-it notes, and whatever other stationery goodies you may find all over the place, we now have a home! A cute home if I do say so myself...


Not only was this DIY super quick and easy, it was very affordable at only $5.50 plus tax. I found the kraft paper boxes at Dollarama for $1 each, in two different sizes, and the cute letter stickers for $1.25 each package (one white, one black) at the Dollar Tree.  I chose to label them with "Clips", "Post-Its" and "Clutter" as the first two are items I use often and have a lot of, while the third I simply found cuter than "Random" or "Stuff", but you could label yours with any words that you find useful or cute! Of course any colour boxes and any styled letters would work too, these just happen to fit my classroom-chic theme!

Do you have a desk-top organizer that works well for you? Mention #mselizabetha or tag me @ms.elizabeth.a on Instagram as I would love to see! If you make your own, please tag me as well! SO excited to place these on my desk tomorrow!

Happy Sunday! XO

Ms. Elizabeth A.

Sunday 16 August 2015

Making a list, checking it twice.

Happy Sunday wonderful lovelies. Dare I say it is that bitter sweet time of year, where we all wish for just one more week of summer at the same time as get giddy over back to school shopping. FYI Canadian teachers, Staples' teacher appreciation days are August 27th, September 3rd & 12th, & for all of my Quebec teachers Bureau en Gros' teacher appreciation days are August 20th, 27th, & September 5th. Take advantage of that 15% discount & grad your free gift - I wonder what it is this year?!



As I sat here sipping on my hot coco, guilty of wishing it was a mimosa, & planning for my first days back at school, I wanted to share my Back to School Checklist I created to help us all be as prepared as possible before we welcome our new students! Please feel free to use for personal use, & send your planning-crazed colleagues my way to get theirs too. I would absolutely love to see how you use it & hear how it helped you get ready so please tag me, @ms.elizabeth.a or #mselizabetha on Instagram. Do you have any helpful tips for teacher back to school prep?! Share your must-do plans in the comments below!

Wishing you all fabulous final summer days, and a fantastic start to the 2015-2016 school year!

XO

Ms. Elizabeth A.

Thursday 6 August 2015

Busy brunching.

I love brunch.
Comfort food, good company, & mimosas: yes please! If you love brunch & planning as much as I do, you are going to love my new favourite weekly event: busy brunching! I am so lucky to work with wonderful ladies who enjoy brunching & planning as much as I do.  So what exactly is busy brunching? The beauty of it is that it can be exactly what you want it to be! Our group has a very stress free vibe & I am loving it! After connecting with coworkers & realizing how many of us spend time working alone over the summer we decided to set up weekly "meetings" where we enjoy delicious food & inspiring company while we plan for next school year. This week my fabulous friend Casey hosted with her wonderful homemade waffles... that I failed to get a picture of because I couldn't resist eating them right away. Bad blogger, I know! Pictures from next time - promise!
As much as I would love to talk about food this entire post I should probably focus on the planning part too. My newest planning obsession is with the many beautiful fonts by the lovely Kimberly Geswein. I am beyond thrilled to have purchased my first set of commercial licenses to be able to share my Summertime Weekly Planning organizer with you! We started our session with filling this helpful handout with our planning goals & ideal weekly to-do lists. With some of us being away the first two weeks of summer vacation we had our first session yesterday, in week three, and therefore we just skipped over week one & two! Next week we are thinking about meeting at a local cafĂ© or restaurant to enjoy our planning... & food.
I would absolutely love to see your summertime planning & how you stay motivated! Please #planningwithmselizabetha so that I can check it out. If you have any of your own great planning tips share them in the comments below or tag me (@ms.elizabeth.a) on Instagram!
Happy planning! 

XO
Ms. Elizabeth A.

Celebrating Canada.

I hope you all had a fabulous day celebrating our beautiful country's birthday! Although the weather was not very cooperative here we still made sure to enjoy family with good food & delicious drinks! 
As a new, proudly Canadian, blogger I have LOVED connecting with, & browsing local shops. There are so many talented entrepreneurs out there that our country should be darn proud of. To all of the boss ladies & gentlemen out there, cheers to you, and to those unsure or hesitating on starting your own business, I say get on it! Let's celebrate our country's own & show the world how incredible our bloggers, crafters, creators & all entrepreneurs are!  
In celebration I have some of my favourites to share with you. Of course these lovely ladies made my top list because of their beautiful, quality products, but also because of their fantastic & friendly service.  
 
As an owner of multiple Trink Jewelry pieces I can personally speak for their quality, comfort and beauty. I have always loved the versatility of Tracy's designs and how she creates such beautiful pieces for both casual & formal wear, accessorizing us from yoga class to our wedding day! I absolutely love the practicality of my own Reflect silk ribbon wrap from her yoga jewelry line as I have worn it both as a bracelet & hair band! There is just something about wearing a piece of jewelry when you know so much love & passion went into each & every step. 
Some of you may know from past posts of my love and admiration for Britne of Let's Plan It & her incredible planner stickers. These are my absolute favourite planing accessories that not only make planning fun but simplify my process & help highlight important details - thank you, Britne!  
 
My newest love affair has been with Wrinkle and Crease, & yes, it was definitely love at first sight. The simplicity of Kayley's paper products make for very attractive pieces. Her stationery products have you covered from greeting cards for all occasions, notepads & weekly planning pads to wonderful wall prints that will add that perfect touch to your home or workplace. 
We have so much to be proud of Canada! Vow with me to support our local shops & please share your favourites on Instagram: #shoplocalcanada - I would love to see them! 
XO
Ms. Elizabeth A. 
| Originally posted online July 2nd 2015. |

Pretty planning.

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Iced coffee and pretty stationery make the planning process for teaching so much more enjoyable. If I am honest, I actually love the planning process but I know it is not for everyone, so I thought I would share some of my pretty planning essentials with you all on this beautiful Monday morning [It is a holiday here in Canada, Happy Victoria Day lovelies!].
Recently my love for planning grew [yes, it's possible] with my recent purchase of planning stickers from the wonderful [and Canadian!] Britne Letourneau of @lets.plan.it.brit . I fell in love with her pastel collection, and was so excited to see her school teacher stickers.
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I love how her stickers suit both my teaching and home life. With adorable ice cream and heart checklist stickers I can easily keep track of personal to do lists and teaching must do's by period. Not only are her own creations wonderful, but this girl does fabulous custom designs too! I went for some exam stickers for my students'  upcoming finals, and tweaked her school collection to have a pay day flag. I truly could not be happier with the look and quality of these planner stickers, and cannot wait to make my massive order for next school year!
Another beautiful boss lady I must mention this morning is the brilliant Blair Turner of @onelessonatatime . The creator of Blair Turner Paper, and the brilliant mind behind the incredible Very Busy Box. If you have not signed up to treat yourself to a surprise delivery of adorably useful stationery you need to add this to your to do list, now. After a busy three months of teaching and completing my intermediate math additional qualification I decided to listen to the May cover of my Kate Spade planner and treat myself with Blair's May Very Busy Box, and I was not disappointed.
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I absolutely love how Blair [& Steve!] include a personal note and description of all the goodies and their shops, making it easy for us very busy people to repurchase our favourite items and find new stationery must haves! Being a self diagnosed list writer addict, I was so pleased to see not one but three paper products; an All Out Of checklist from the always fun Knock Knock, making grocery list writing a breeze, and two gorgeous and inspiring note pads from Blair's own collection. Clearly, I am one happy list maker, but perhaps I should vow to not purchasing any new paper products until I finish these.. we'll see.
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The gold facet box from Creative Co-Op , and my new friend Teddie the turtle from Oh Hello Friend added the perfect antique touch to my workspace and organized my papers and paper clips. As much as I love to say I have the summers off, I spend a lot of my time planning in my office where I enjoy opening the windows and taking in all the fresh air I can get. Teddie will definitely be put to good use this year, by helping me keep my important papers in place.
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With taking the words right off my new Blair Turner Paper pad BE JOYFUL NOW and treat yourself to some pretty planning accessories and ENJOY the planning process. As for summer planning, this year I have scheduled planning days with one of my coworkers as a way for us to motivate each other, and make September a little less crazy!
Wishing all of you a fabulous spring, and end to the school year. Countdown your days until summer vacation with me by saving this photo and add your number of days left, upload to Instagram and hashtag #mselizabetha .
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