Friends! I’m so pleased to share our first gift DIY of the season. Maude made these fantastic monogrammed mugs over the weekend. Don’t they look terrific? The idea came when we saw these fun initial cups at Anthropologie and remembered our kitchen was lacking in hot cocoa mugs. We decided to create a whole set.
It’s a very doable project. Inexpensive. Eco-friendly. And family-friendly too — these mugs are dishwasher safe. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.
1) We started with a trip to Goodwill, where we collected 8 plain white mugs. Enough for the entire family. There was even a little one without a handle that we thought would be perfect for baby food for June. Mugs were 50 cents each and we had dozens and dozens to choose from.
2) Then we gathered supplies. Scissors, pen, tape, graphite transfer paper, Black Pebeo Porcelaine Pen in Fine Point ($4 at Michaels, also available here) and a print out with the family’s initials.
For the font, I had something very specific in mind. I love the look of this Sketch Block Font and had it mentally filed away as the sort of thing a kid could replicate well — because it’s inherently imperfect. For this project, it worked like a charm! Since we were adding our own sketchiness, I started with a similar, but non-sketchy Rockwell font. Look for any slab-serif font (with names like Egyptian or Glypha) and they should work equally well.
3) Cut out an initial and a piece of transfer paper. Tape the initial and the transfer paper (dark side down) to the mug.
4) Trace the initial. Any pen or pencil will work and you’ll want to experiment with different pressures to see what’s best. You’ll just need a light outline. If you want, you can make your own transfer paper by rubbing a graphite pencil all over a sheet of plain paper.
5) Take your Porcelaine pen and trace over the lines of the initial. Get the edges nice and thick then fill in with diagonal sketchy strokes. A few notes:
- The sketchy strokes look best if they’re all one direction.
- The pen didn’t produce very smooth lines for us — which was fine because of the sketchy nature of the lettering. But later, I tried a red Porcelaine pen and produced very smooth strokes. So, I’m thinking my black pen was an old, dried out one. Who knows? This was my first experience with Porcelaine, so I’m not sure.
- It helped to have a blank paper handy where we could test the paint pen.
- We definitely got better at it as we practiced. So plan on it. Until it’s baked, the paint will scrub right off in soap and water. We redid mugs at least 4 times.
6) Once the lettering is done, let the mugs sit for 24 hours. Then bake them at 300 degrees for 35 minutes. It’s fine to bake them with graphite residue. The graphite will wipe right off even after they’re done baking.
7) And that’s it! Once they’re baked, they’re done. We pulled them from the oven, wiped them up and they were ready to go. For fun, we filled cellophane bags with hot cocoa mix and marshmallows and put them in the mugs.
The project turned out so well that it has my mind spinning with other possibilities. Maybe we’ll make a monogrammed mug for their teachers with a Starbucks card inside. Or a matching 2-cup set for Grandma and Grandpa. Fun for Christmas, but equally fun for other events too.
What do you think? Is this a project your kids would enjoy? Are the mugs cool enough that you would buy one in the store if you saw it for sale?
Need more sibling gift ideas? We made several fun projects this year: Bleached Out Tees, Bottlecap Magnets, Custom Leather Patches and Photo Snowglobes. You can also find a list of projects from past Christmases here.
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oh my gosh… what a wonderful idea!!! my homemade christmas list for everyone is getting longer and longer! ;) and i couldn’t be happier!!
Oh hooray. I always love seeing your family’s fantastically creative holiday DIYs. So impressive every year. This is definitely something fun you could do have all sorts of experimental fun with. Thanks for sharing!
easy peasy, simple, fun and quick!I like that very much… I still have some white cups lying around, thank you!
I love this idea and can’t wait to use it with my kids. This will make a great Christmas gift for Grandparents. Thanks!
Love, love these homemade-Christmas-gifts posts. Does baby June get her own cup, too? :)
Did a more thorough reading and answered that myself. Clever, clever. I love that you riffed off of Anthropologie. Lots of pretty things, but also for pretty prices. Goodwill, though? That’s my speed.
Brilliant! Maybe I can get my son to help me with this one…
We also have the tradition of homemade sibling gifts, and mugs have been on my list for a few years. I have had a few ideas: pictures of each person on the mug, the inside painted a different color for each person, etc. Your monograms are a terrific idea and look great.
LOVE IT!
Perfect!! I was just thinking my kids really needed their own special hot cocoa mugs (i.e., not my favorite pottery ones ;)!)…this is a GREAT idea!
Awesome, Gabby! My hubby and I have the monogrammed mugs from Anthropology but the kids don’t have them. I think I just found a gift to make them. Thank you, thank you!
Awesome Project. Kids and I will have tons of fun making these for their teachers! Oooh what about Mustache mugs?
So fabulous! I can see so many variations on this project, too – maybe holiday mugs with scribbled-in stockings, trees, gingerbread men, etc. What fun!
Thanks for the step-by-step info…. :)
I think this is my favorite post ever. Good job Maud, and thanks for sharing your beautiful idea. I am definetly making these for Christmas. Question, is the pen totally safe? Could I have my son draw on a plate and then we eat from the plate?
What a nice idea! Thank you for sharing – I love this. :)
Wow – I love that! The fact that the cups are all different makes it even better. I think these would make great stocking stuffers, too!
This is such a great idea. I have TONS of cocoa mix leftover from a recent baby shower. I see these as teacher gifts, for sure, with the mugs designed by the kids. I’ll probably have to pick up a couple extra mugs, because I’m sure the kids will want to make one for themselves, too!
I loved this idea! We’ve been trying to come up with creative, fun and relatively inexpensive gift ideas for Christmas, and this definitely fits the bill. Thanks!
I love this idea! TY
These are fantastic! I might just have to add some homemade peppermint marshmallows for adults… Wonderful idea!
Love the mugs! Love the mismatched ensemble! Great idea.
Do you think that you could use stencils and the pens and avoid the transfer paper all together? These are really cool and I have a lot of ideas for presents now, so thank you!
The cutest and coolest DIY ever! Great job Maude!:)
I love the effortless DIY projects you have. The cocoa in the mugs makes this present so perfect. Bravo!
Wow, these look store-bought! Can’t wait to see all the sibling gifts, esp. the ones for Flora June! :)
awesome idea!!!
I love this! I am definitely making mugs for all my friends for Christmas and Hanukkah this year!
Dang, girl. I love this idea. But then again, I love many of the ideas you have. My favorite element is that all the mugs are different shapes and sizes, but all white.
I’m going to bookmark this using Del.icio.us. Which you also introduced me to. Yup; you’re my go-to girl for happiness and tingling in the brain.
Brilliant! Maude obviously inherited your creative & design streak. I’ve been wanting to use the Sketch Block font for something for ages. Love it. Thanks
And to answer your question: No, I wouldn’t buy it if I found it in a store. They’re cool enough to buy in the store, and I’m sure I could find things like this, but part of the coolness is that each mug is a different size and shape. I highly doubt any supplier in a brick-and-mortar store would go through the trouble of making every letter of the alphabet in many different sizes and shapes.
Nothing made in a factory, anyway.
Love these, can’t wait to make them for christmas presents this year!
totally awesome and very cute! good job, maude! (and mom!)
what a fun idea…i LOVE it! thank you, thank you for sharing! will definitely be attempting…possibly later this week? :)
WOW! Brilliant idea! I am bookmarking this one!
AMAZING! And on so many levels, my favorite being that Maude was involved and every time she sees her family use a mug, will be so happy knowing she helped make them.
Just wonderful.
love this idea these are great. FYI I used to do a lot of gift making with those porcelaine pens and I always found that different colors had different levels of tackiness. The darker colors always tended to be stickier for some reason that the lighter ones. That could be why your red pen was different. I might have to dust off my box of those paints!
This is a great idea, I’m totally going to use it for gifts this Christmas. Thanks!
I love this! Thanks so much for the tutorial!
Great job, Maude! Your sibs will love this gift. I want one, too! I am adding this to my list. My Anthropologie was out of my letter. Now I can makey own!
I can’t wait to try this! I love the different sized mugs, too. Great idea!
I love this project!! I know my almost 9 year old would enjoy doing something like this. We may give it a try. Thanks for sharing!!
Oh how lovely!! I can’t wait to make with my kids! I may even try to do their handprints on a plate using this technique! So fun! Thanks for your wonderful DYI!
These are fabulous! I would be thrilled if you would link this to my Thrifty Christmas Challenge. It is sure to be quite an inspiration to many bloggers. Thanks for sharing! :)
Larri at Seams Inspired
Great idea and I love that you filled them with hot cocoa and mashmallows
That’s a great idea! Tanks for sharing!!!
love these. i want to do these with my kids and nieces. maybe after a big turkey dinner?
This is SO cool! I absolutely love this idea and would love to do this for all of our daughter’s PT/OT’s as thank you gifts for Christmas. Thank you for sharing all the pic’s – that’s a big help!
My son made me a mug for Mother’s Day last year! It is my favorite favorite cup!!!!
And… just like that, with your innovative magic the mugs are waaaaay prettier and more heart-warming than the Anthropologie ones. Beautiful.
I love this idea! I was thinking of taking the kids to a pottery place to paint a mug with their handprints, but now I’m thinking that this technique will work!
I love the idea of going to the Goodwill for the mugs. You save money and repurpose items that others gave away. Love it, love it, love it!
Love with a capital LO! This is perfect – I’ve been thinking of making special plates and mugs for a while and not totally sure where to start. But of course every great projects starts at Goodwill. LOVE!
These would be awesome teachers gifts, and cheap enough to make for all the middle school teachers my daughter has. Awesome!
This is EXACTLY what I had planned for my kids teacher gifts. I have the red mugs sitting on my kitchen counter just waiting for the monograms. I wasn’t sure about what paint to use, so this was helpful to know your experience with it! Thanks!
Thank you for the inspiration. I have made shaving soap for gifts and the plain mugs were bugging me. Now I know how to finish off my gifts.
These are wonderful!
Not sure if someone asked this before but how did you make the stickers? My DIY this year for christmas gifts (my two year old is not quite big enough to make these ;-) is going to be mason jars full of homemade granola and I would love to top off each jar with stickers like these.
What a great DIY project! My girls each received Missus monogrammed mugs as birthday presents from my sister (the perfect gift for a little girl!) I have also given them as wedding presents. . . the bride’s in Missus and a regular one for the groom.
I like looking at everything in Anthropologie, and I always walk out of there with a new mug to give to someone. . . mostly because it’s the only thing I can afford!
A great project! I love it.
This idea is FANTASTIC! :) We’re big handmade people, so this is definitely going on my list of future projects. Thanks so much for sharing it with us!
asldkfjsad asldkfja !!!! I’m so speechless. That’s great. I’m doing it. (sorry, maude.)
awesome sauce. really. maybe even I could pull this one off!
These are AMAZING. And they have an expensive look to them. I never would have guessed that they were from goodwill. Thanks for sharing. I am making these.
love the idea. i found similar fonts free called Manuscrit Regular font — Created in by CloutierFontes free at
http://www.fontspace.com/cloutierfontes/manuscrit-regular
you can also just draw your own…
I love the cups! I would love to try having my oldest make these for our family. Question for you: how to you go about making sibling gifts without the others seeing what’s going on? Do you have the maker stay up later than the others?
Those are great!
Love this!! Okay. You totally inspired me. I teach kindergarteners – and I’m always looking for fun crafty-type gifts that the children can make for their parents for the holidays. I’m thinking this would be perfect for Mother’s Day. Maybe I can find tall, travel-size ceramic mugs?? The kids could definitely trace a design… and they would love that we bake them!!
I am going to use this for my first grade student’s for their parent’s holiday gift. I am always struggling for something that is for all religions. This is going to be so cute!!!! Thank you!
BINGO! found this years Christmas DIY’s….sure beats painting ornaments!
Thanks :)
Erin
These are amazing! Love!
I’m knee deep in the middle of this project, I love it so far. Although, the black pen is bugging me. Maybe I just picked up a bad pen, but I’ve been trying to paint the same mug for 1 1/2 hours! I think I’ll try a different color tomorrow.
Okay, I’m back. I went to Michael’s this morning and bought a different marker with a more blunt tip. Maybe it’s the fine tip markers are harder to get going? I just did a mug with this new marker and it took me 10 minutes. Phew! thanks for the great idea!
We just did almost the same thing for the kiddos in our family!
I really don’t know how you do, what you do. AMAZING! I need to take a workshop from you. I have three kids and can’t even get through my laundry pile, let alone accomplish what you do on a daily basis with SIX! I love your blog! It’s one of the first that I strated looking at about two years ago, this is my first time commenting, and I look it over most everyday since. Very inspiring. Thank you!
I love this! Thanks for sharing. I am featuring it at Not Just Decorating. Feel free to grab a featured button if you’d like and have a great day :)
How is that I didn’t see this ones before…I love them!
Love it! I am going to see if I can find some time to do this as a additional gift for my son’s preschool therapists.
I’m trying to do this…Question: How did you get the font printed up so large? I am using the Rockefeller font and the largest I can get is a 72 & it looks to small on these mugs. Ug. Anyone?
If like mine is shows up to 72 but you can type in whatever size you would like. :)
this is brilliant. for younger ones it would work for them to just draw freehand without a letter, right?
we are trying to come up with gifts to make instead of buy and i LOVE the ideas you have been posting.
LOVE IT! I hope I am half as creative of a mother as you. Love the fact that you have them MAKE presents for their siblings. Much more personalized. Ak, can’t wait to make some mugs!!
Awesome! Love that you got the mugs from Goodwill, and that they are all different! Looks most impressive when you have a big family to create mugs for :)
Thank you for the instructions. I finally found some time to make some for my “hand-made Christmas”. They turned out great.
I followed this tutorial of yours and it worked perfectly, thanks!
http://kiralynnpdx.blogspot.com/search/label/DIY%20Christmas
-Kira
Cute idea! Thank you for sharing. ♥
I did something similar this Christmas. Rather than using carbon paper, I rubbed the back of the paper I wanted to trace with a pencil and then traced the front. It worked great and saved money!
This is awesome! You should post this over on Instructables.com. There’s a contest right now that this would be perfect for!
oh, I wish I had seen this before Christmas! I love it!!!
So cute! I can’t wait to try them.
I love this idea! Are the cups dishwasher safe? Will the letter come off when you wash it? Just curious. Thanks!
Love this! Though I have to say that I also love the look of the transferred graphite before you even started coloring in with the pens. Too bad that look would be too hard to do.
I’ve used those pens before (well, the glass versions), but forgot how fun they are.
Wow these are great! I wish I had seen this before Christmas but, I do know a bunch of people with birthdays coming up… wheels turning in mind…
I love your initial mugs! I made a set of painted mugs for bridal shower gifts using a similar technique:
http://ourhumbleabowed.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/mug-shot/
I loved your mug idea. I love simple, graphic craft projects! We had LOTS of family staying with us for the week of Christmas. So, I made everyone a mug with their initial on it – it saved us a lot of trouble trying to remember who put their coffee mug down where each morning! At the end of the week, everyone got to take their mug home with them.
Love these!! Fantastic idea!! I just shared it in my post 10 Great Monogram Projects!!! I want to do some of these for gifts for sure!
http://frugalflourish.blogspot.com/2011/01/ten-monogram-craft-ideas.html
Oh my heavens, I love these. I found you over at Frugal With a Flourish and I’m SO glad I clicked over. Brilliant!
Do you know if these are microwave-safe?
soooooo cute. i am going to make these for our family. we already have white mugs. i am all about the monograms. thanks for the idea.
Super easy to make, Also, these look WAAAAAAAAAY better than the originals. Seriously, good job.
I love this and I know my kids would love making them!
LOVE LOVE L O V E these!! This is going to be our teacher, therapists, bus drivers, grandparents, aunts, uncles.. it’s our gift across the board! FANTASTIC!! I’m excited about this!! Thanks for sharing!!
I would definitely buy these!! So cute! :)
I love this idea! The ‘sketchy’ design turned out great, can’t wait to try it myself.
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