Glasses

We often have dinner as a family at my in-laws. The family is small … my husband has only one sister, so even with all of our children, there are only 10 of us. Since the family is small enough to fit around the dinner table, we use “real” dishes. We have tried to mark them so we can keep them straight. My mother-in-law made little rings to go around the glasses one year, but we could never remember who had a bell or a tree.

This year, I decided to make monogrammed glasses for everyone to solve this little problem. My first thought was to find pretty, mismatched glasses at a thrift store. But I worried my mother-in-law wouldn’t like a mismatched set. She’s much more formal than I am. So, I decided to buy glasses at a discount store. They came in sets of 4, so I did 12. (and, since they came in boxes, they were easy to wrap)

I used the Cricut Craft Room to create the designs. Most of them were a fancy box with a letter inside. I cut them out in vinyl and then adhered them to the glass … curves are difficult to work on. I kept the monograms small and tried to find the flattest part of the glass to work on.

Then, I added painters’ tape around the vinyl to make sure I didn’t etch any part of the glass I didn’t want to etch.

I used a squeegee to make sure everything was sealed tight and there were no air bubbles anywhere.

Then I applied a thick layer of Etchall and let the glasses sit for 15 minutes. I used a pair of bowl to hold the glasses so they would not roll around. I did them in batches of 4, so the time did not get away from me.

That done, I washed off the cream, pulled off the tape and vinyl and then washed the glasses. Beautiful!