Our DIY Mugs

So finally finally we finished our mugs! They took a lot of researching to find out the best way to decorate these ourselves so they would be waterproof. However, once we figured it out, these were easy to do.

Click the image to open in full size.

Here's how we did it:

We ordered our mugs off of ebay. They have a tight fitting lid and a slide back drink thing. They are well made, but they are NOT dishwasher safe. I can't remember the seller now

I'll have to see if I can find the link - I think I posted it somewhere else on this forum at some point.

Then we tried to find something that would adhere permanently to plastic. Easier said than done. I tried paint markers (didn't work), regular paint (didn't work), and spray paint for plastic (by Krylon called Fusion - worked). However, we wanted to put each person's name on it, and creating stencils for that would have been really time consuming. So the Krylon works great if you have an easy stencil, but that wasn't us (note that the Krylon takes 7 days to dry so it won't chip). Finally we got some weather proof shipping labels from Office Max. We printed our our design on them - there were two huge labels per sheet, so it was easy to do our design multiple times per sheet. We didn't have a laser printer, so we had Office Max do it for us - 42 cents per page (color) and we only needed 4 pages.

Even though they are waterproof, we wanted to give an extra coat of protection because the ink itself isn't. So we sprayed the sheets with Rust-o-leum clear coat protector. After they dried, we cut them out and stuck them on!

Each mug cost us $1.40 total (and that is calculating the cost of all the labels, even though we only used 4 sheets out of the 10 in the packet). Otherwise, it's $1.11.

Getting them on was a little tricky....so here are some hints if you do this.

* Pay attention to the shape of your mug and make sure the sticker fits flat. At first my sticker was too long, and because the mug was a little wider on top, the sticker puckered on the bottom.
* I found it easiest to peel back a little bit of the label backing, center it on the mug, and adhere the little exposed side first. This allowed me to place the label straight and anchor it before I tried to smooth it all on. Then, working from the stuck side out, I could smooth the rest down as I removed the backing. This worked best to prevent air bubbles.

Click the image to open in full size.