the Pintester Movement- How to Decorate a Coffee Mug Using a Porcelain Marker

My last post was about how much I love Pinterest, this post is sorta related.  I follow this blog of Sonja Foust who runs the blog Pintester.  She blogged about trying some of the more "interesting" pins that people see when scrolling down the everything & popular pages of Pinterest.  I love her and her blog, it's supper funny and I recommend you read it.

She's starting a thing called the Pintester Movement, where we try some pins and see how they go. I think I picked a pretty easy one, and I was pretty sure it was going to work on way or an other.  

How to Decorate a Coffee Mug Using a Porcelain Marker

From tuts+

So it isn't a Sharpie Marker mug, that I know for sure doesn't work. I was pretty sure that the porcelain marker would work on, you know, porcelain.  But I was skeptical of there transfer method.  So here I am, testing it.

Step one: Take you sharpie Marker mug that's been sitting in your kitchen for the past year and wash off all the shit from it.  

 

So last year I tried to make a mug with a caffeine molecule, with underneath saying "All you need is C8H10N4O2." Thought it would be fun for my first year of Engineering. As you can tell, the sharpie chipped off.  So I washed it expecting it to be a little hard to take off.  That was not the case, it came off easier and BAM.   A nice mug to try this pin on.

So clean 

 So I printed out the monsters the site recommended, I was too uncreative to come up this something else.

Toke this picture in my basement with bad lighting, it happens 

 So next I toke the darkest pencil from my collection (yeah, I have more than one pencil type, it's what you get when you have to take Architecture classes). I think it was a B?  I can't recall. Doesn't matter you go over the important parts with it.

Here's our little monster fellow all draw up. If you squint your eyes, you can sorta tell I drew over it. 

Next taping that mother to your mug.  It was harder than expected.  Why you ask?  Paper is flat, mugs are not, so I had to put little folds in it to make it work. After a bit taping and bitching it when on.  

Than I toke my marker and rubbed it all over the paper. I wasn't expecting much from this transfer.  

And nothing much came from it.  But enough to to wig it.

Which is what I did,  and it looks pretty good. I have a orange porcelain marker from a kit I got during my reading week, which was convenient.

Since the mug was a little bland with only the monster on and that creative juices where now flowing, I free handed some extra on to it. 

Lizzie Bennet quote

So this part I was a little confused about the box I got the pen in said wait 24 hours then bake at 300 for 35 mins. The pen it self said let sit for 72 hours.  I'm to impatience for that so I waited 23 hours then cooked it.   

So here's a little 360 turn of my mug all finished up. 

 


And here's my first cup of tea with it.  I haven't washed it yet, because I'm to scared but I'll post an update after it happens and tell you how it went.

Update: I had washed it, nothing came off!! I'm so happy, the pens claimed it was dish washer safe but I'm going to stick to hand washing it.  I'd say that as long as you're not rubbing to hard it should stay for a good while.

Mmmmmm

So my conclusion, the whole transfer technique technically worked, but it was more effort than it was worth to get all of it off there.  If you are half decent at drawing, you should just go free hand and use a picture as a reference.   If you can't draw... Well the transfer might help, but be warned it might not.

 

I was having font problems, so don't judge my really bad ms paint job.  

So since the pin went pretty well, I feel like I need to mess one up to really be in the spirit of the movement, so keep an eye out for that.  

Thanks you Sonja this was fun. 

Check it out for yourself

 http://pintester.com/2013/05/the-pintester-movement-craft-all-the-things