Salt From Student Tears

While I was looking around for Christmas presents for my teachers I came across THIS SITE where they sell salt made of tears it seems to just be sea salt but it sparked a thought. Being a senior in an engineering program at a smaller school I have had some hard classes, some hard teachers, and each teacher for several classes. I came up with the idea salt made form student tears. The salt jars are going to be custom for each teacher with the hardest part of the classes or the teacher’s specialty involving why a student would cried.

Parts:
Jars with corks    ~$1 a piece
Coarse Sea Salt   ~$9 a pound
Logos                   ~Free
Glue stick              ~Free

The logo is made up of 3 main parts: the top banner, middle showing that it is made of student tears, and the bottom that is specific to each teacher.

Top
I am not addressing who the gifts are from but I did add a code in the top line with my name, this might have been the hardest part. It’s an unnecessary step but gives the finished product a cleaner look. The top line could have just been a related phrase or motto.
We Installed Life’s Logic Year = WILLY

To arc the text I used the create wrapped text icon in Photoshops text edit bar.

Middle
This is the part where the tears come from. For this instructable I am using teacher’s tears but it could also be from anyone or anything else. If the gift was to give a set of them to someone it could be easily be for their job or hobby.

Bottom
This is the most unique part where I made it individual for each teacher. It was a little hard coming up with reasons students would cry without saying the teacher did a bad job or point out what I didn’t like about the classes. Even though my teachers are laid back and would find most comments as a joke I checked with a few friends that they thought the comments were appropriate also.

It was hard to fit the comments on one line. Some tricks I used to fit the longer phrases on the line include changing the font sizes and squishing the text. To squish the text in Photoshop right click on the layer with the text and select Rasterize. After the text is rasterized the layer can be manipulated with free transform.

I made one template file (its attached) then changed the bottom text for each bottle. After the text was changed I saved a copy as a .jpg. I inserted all the final .jpgs into a MS Word doc so that they could be printed at once and re-sized easily.

Filling the jars is easy. Just make a funnel from a rolled sheet of paper and spoon the salt in. It helps to tap the jar and the funnel on the table to get the salt to flow faster. I bought several different types of salt and mixed them so that I could have different colors but I bought way too much. For 24 jars I used about half a pound of sand.

After I was finished filling some of the jars looked more like sand art then student tears. It may be better just to use gray and white salts. Not wanting to throw away half my salts I plan to use the more colorful salts as unicorn tears.

Alrighty, the bottles are filled, it’s time to print the logos and finish. I used thicker resume paper for my logos but I’m not sure if it helped much.
Cut out the logos however you like, scissors were easier than an x acto-knife for me. Use the glue stick to glue the logo on the front then wrap the ribbon over the top and glue it to the back. That’s it, after their dry their done.


I noticed that some of my logos are a little specific for my engineering classes so here are some ideas of jars I plan to do next. Good luck on yours.

A gift set for an elementary school teacher:
Student tears from
Pop quizzes, spelling test, and multiplication tables

A gift set for a mechanic:
Mechanic tears from
Missing a socket, and looking for the “tick”

A gift set for a gamer:
Gamer tears form
No save points, Campers and losing to kids