What can I craft this Tuesday? A Long Distance Mug

As much as I love a good alliteration, Tuesday Thriftovers wasn't working for everything I wanted to do. It's restrictive and I didn't like it. So I'm renaming Tuesdays. Don't worry, it's all the stuff you would've gotten anyway. Here's today's post:

I'm not sure what's gotten into me, but I'm all into Christmas right now. I've already gotten presents for my mom, my sister-in-law, and I've started on my nephews. I saw this really neat pin a while ago and I knew instantly I wanted to make it for my best friend. Since she doesn't read my blog (yet) I can post it here well before Christmas time. As I mentioned before I'm going to add more pictures of my steps so you can see the progress at each step.

I started with two plain white mugs I picked up from the dollar store. I had a black sharpie, black sharpie paint pen, and red bic permanent market on hand.

I wanted it to look and with Colorado it's not hard because let's face it, it's a box. New York is a bit trickier. No matter, I printed out pictures of each state and used my superior scissor skills to make templates. I held down the Colorado template because it was four straight-ish lines. I taped down the New York in order to keep it steady.

Here's the result. See, Colorado is totally a box.

Then I added little hearts as to where we both live. She lives in Denver, I live near Albany. You can see the map on my monitor that I used to put the hearts in the general vicinity of where they are actually.

I found this quote that I love and it always reminds me of our friendship. "Together forever, never apart. Maybe in distance but never in heart."

Then I threw these bad boys in my cold oven to set the ink and mesh it with the glaze.

I set my oven for 400 F and let the mugs heat up with the oven. Then I set my timer for 30 minutes and went back to work. After the 30 minutes I turned off the oven and let the mugs cool down with the oven.

 

After they were cool, I wiped them down to make sure I didn't screw up the ink was truly set. While working on this today I found a great post with some tips and tricks for crafty on mugs, plates, etcs. Now I wait for Christmas so I can send it out! I'll package it with tea, some honey sticks, and a note of love to her!

I'll leave you with a picture of us from my wedding. Love you Christina!