A Birthday Cake for a Teacher {Supply Cake}

One of the first things I saw when I joined Pinterest was this supply cake. I KNEW that is what I needed to make for the birthday's of my kids' teachers this year. As you can tell from this blog I'm a big advocate of giving teachers a little something. Unless you are in the schools (volunteering/substitute teaching, etc) you have no idea how much these teachers do!
Since I work at the elementary school, every month I look at the whiteboard calendar to see if it contains any birthday's I need to know about.  So the beginning of March I look at the calendar and see that Boo's Teacher's birthday is the NEXT day!  I still want to do make her a supply cake, but I have no time to go to the store.  So I do the next best thing.  I go through my stash of school/office supplies to create this:

If I had more time/supplies I would've liked to do a few different things to it, but considering I didn't purchase anything I think it turned out nicely.
I didn't take step by step instructions, but here is what I did.  First I took a roll of paper towels as the center to hold everything.  If I had it on hand I would have used a large (Coscto size) container of Lysol wipes.  Teachers definitely could use those more than paper towels.  Anyway, take a roll of paper towels (or container of wipes) and wrap around some spiral notebooks (or folders with or without brads - or even composition notebooks, but these are short for paper towel center) and stick a large file elastic around the entire thing to hold it together.  It will probably require extra hands because those notebooks don't like to stay curled around.  Don't worry too much about how spread out they are, you can move them around after the elastic is on.

I almost forgot.  You will need a base.  It ends up being pretty heavy so make sure it is sturdy.  You could you cardboard or a cake base, but I stuck with the supply theme and used a clipboard (I just set the cake on it, I didn't adhere it):

 

Now it is time to put supplies onto the cake.  I really like the boxes of crayons along the bottom to make the bottom layer wider, but I didn't have enough.  So going through my supplies I came up with this:

The bottom layer of the cake is glue.  It rotates between liquid glue and glue sticks.  As you can see I had two different kinds of school glue on here.  I wanted a middle layer, but it couldn't be too thick and so I came up with post-its.  One can never have too many post-its! Put as many on as you can and put another elastic around it.  You can add more after the elastic is on.
For the top I put a smaller elastic around three boxes of crayons.  Then put mores supplies around them.  First I added pencils to two sides opposite each other.  To the other two sides there are pens (They lay flat against the crayons when my hand isn't moving them).

I thought it was a little plain so we added more supplies around the pens and pencils. On one side are some stamps:

On the opposite side are some dry erase markers:

The other two sides have a pencil sharpener, an eraser, and a bottle of white-out.  On top/in the center is a container of clips:

After all your supplies are attached via elastic (and if you have pieces such as the crayon topper attach with adhesive - I used a tape runner). It is time to add ribbon to cover up all those elastics you see:

I went through the ribbon stash and found some cupcake ribbon and alphabet ribbon.  I found some coordinating 1 1/2 inch ribbon.  I didn't have much left of the pink & yellow cupcakes, but there was a few elastics to cover up (since I added so many layers).  I used the yellow ribbon over the elastics and had just enough cupcake ribbon to put around one of the ribbons:

The middle layer has the alphabet ribbon:

and then another layer of birthday ribbon:

Here is the full cake with the ribbon:

I decided it need a little something else to spruce it up and hide the seams in the ribbon.  I went through the flower stash to see what I had in coordinating colors.  I came up with this:

I think Boo's teacher was impressed with her cake.  Hopefully she will enjoy it and won't have to purchase many supplies out of her own pocket.  Happy Birthday Ms. Millson!

Linking to:

Bloom Design