Ideas for Decorating a Mug

I have always loved to make crafts in my free time.  Ever since I was little I loved doing crafty things.  It might have helped considering that my mom is an art teacher.  She was always willing to let me do all kinds of artsy things.  Even if it made a bit of a mess as long as we could clean it up after. As I got older I started to do more crafts with my friends.  I have done many different crafts throughout my life.  However recently I have come to love decorating mugs.  A few weeks before spring break my roommate Bre and her friends where decorating mugs and I thought to myself "wow that looks like a fun craft I should do that."  When spring break came my other roommate Sara and I where all alone and had nothing to do.  We decided that since we both love crafts so much that is what we should do.  It took some time to decide what we wanted to do.  We decided to decorate mugs.  We went to Walmart with our friend Kate.  We each bought 2 mugs to start with.  We ended up loving decorating mugs so much that the next day we went back and bought all of the white mugs at Walmart. Oooops! I love making them so much I thought about making an Etsy shop and selling them.  The mugs are something that you can buy for cheap.  Which is really great because I am a poor college student.  There are also many different ways that you can decorate a mug which makes it more fun.  You do not always have to use the same technique you can change it based on the materials you have and how difficult you want to get.  It can also take as little or much time as you want.  The baking is the longest part.  The first styles I attempted where drawing with sharpie and creating a marble effect using nail polish

 materials needed:
-one white mug
-sharpies
-oven
-nail polish
-container (that can fit a mug in it)
-warm water

Start by drawing whatever design you want on your mug.  If you are not sure you might want to sketch it out on a piece of paper first to figure out if that is really the design you want.  Put the mugs in the oven.  Put them on a cookie sheet first not directly on the rack.  Then heat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Leave them in for 30 minutes.  Then turn the oven off.  Let the oven and the mugs cool down with the mugs still in the oven.  Heating the mugs in the oven bakes the sharpie into the mug making it permanent.  Sometimes there are burn marks left after you put the mugs in the oven.  You can get these off with rubbing alcohol.  If you want your mug to be done after this that is okay, or you can add more which leads us to the next idea.

The next thing you can do is create a marble water color look on the mug.  Start by filling the container with warm not hot water.  Then put some nail polish in the water.  It should float on top and disperse.  Sometimes it sinks to the bottom in little bubbles.  If you poke the bubbles with a fork they will pop and then spread out.  It also helps if you let the nail polish drip into the container do not flick it.  After making a few different mugs, I started to realize that when you put nail polish into the container make sure you put it in a different spot, because the nail polish spreads out.  Then if you put the polish in the same spot it won't spread it will just rest on top of the other nail polish.  If you put it in a different spots it will spread out and give it more of a watercolor marbling effect.  Unless you want dots then you can layer the nail polish.  Then you dip the mug into the water.  The nail polish sticks to the mug giving it the marble effect.  Make sure you pat dry; do not rub or the design could smear.  If some of the nail polish gets on the inside of the mug then you can just use nail polish remover.  If you use the nail polish on the mug you should not bake it after.  You also need to hand wash.

The first mug I did was the one with a letter.  I wanted to get a really nice looking letter.  I went and bought stickers.  This way I could draw the polka-dots over the sticker and not worry about messing up the letter.  I have the worst handwriting so I wanted it to look nice.  I started by looking through the sharpies I had and figuring out what colors looked nice together.  Then I just started drawing polka-dots along the lines of the sticker.  Make sure you get as much of the edge of the sticker.  At one point I realized that I wasn't actually coloring along the lines, so when I took the sticker off you wouldn't be able to tell the shape of the letter.  This is why you need to remember to color all along the sticker.  At first I was worried because the polka-dots where smaller then I planned.  It turned out look pretty great in my opinion though.