DIY Chevron Mug

How many of you have seen the Pinterest posts for making your own Sharpie mug? They're all over, right? But if you've searched enough, you also have seen people say it is a Pinterest Fail. The Sharpie is not dishwasher safe. Back in January, I had a hangout day with several of my girlfriends. I bought Dollar Store mugs for all of us and we used my Sharpies to design our own mugs. It was a lot of fun, but I warned them it might not be dishwasher safe. I have still not used or washed this mug yet so did not really know what would happen.

On Friday, my teacher partner approached me with an idea for gifts for our reading switch teachers. She thought maybe the students in each group could decorate some sort of travel mug for their teacher. Then this idea popped into my head! I had seen this blog post about dishwasher safe Sharpie mugs, but had not had time to try it out yet. I told the other teacher about it and that I would test it this weekend before we had the students do it.

With that said, I left school and stopped by our new JoAnn's to get a Sharpie oil-based paint marker and then the Dollar Store to get a white mug. I used a 50% off coupon at JoAnn's so the marker cost $1.84 and the mug cost $1.06. This project cost $2.90!!!

Sharpie is not the only brand that makes these markers, but they were the best price. They sell them in extra fine, fine, medium, and bold tips. You can get individual markers or a pack of 5. I chose yellow although I was a little bit nervous that it would show up very well on the white mug. My skepticism comes from the regular Sharpie markers not being very bold on the mug.

I used a ruler to measure and cut 2inch strips of masking tape. I then cut each 2inch strip in half (vertically) so that I had two skinnier 2inch pieces. I started at the top of the mug and worked to overlap tape pieces in a chevron strip pattern. This definitely took some work, patience, and good eyeballing. I asked my husband several times if it looked right. My mug tapered which made it hard to keep the stripes the same going down the mug.

Once the mug was all taped off, it was time to paint! The directions on the marker say to take the cap off and depress the tip one time with your finger. Put the cap back on and shake to get the paint flowing. (Shake it with the tip down). Then press the tip down a few times on the surface to get the paint flowing steadily.

Here is my mug all painted. I decided to leave the handle white since that would have been really hard to do in the chevron (at least for me). You can't really tell in the picture, but you can somewhat see pen strokes. I found that if you pressed the tip down every so often, the paint would come out and spread better rather than look like a marker.

I let the mug dry for over an hour before taking the tape off.

There were several places where the paint had seeped under the tape and my stripes didn't have nice crisp edges. I dipped a q-tip in rubbing alcohol and "painted" it on top of the areas I wanted to "erase". I used the dry side of the q-tip to actually wipe the unwanted yellow off. This worked really well!

According to the blog post, the mug should go in the oven WHILE it preheats to 350. I put mine on a tray so that it wouldn't fall over. Once the oven reaches 350, set a timer for 30 minutes. After the 30 minutes, turn the oven off, but leave the mug in the oven while both cool down. I left the oven door cracked open a bit to help this part move along.

It came out looking great! I was so excited/proud of my work!
Finally it was the time for the dishwasher test. I grabbed my other Sharpie mug so that I could compare results.

Here are the mugs before the dishwasher.

And after.

NOTE: The before picture was taken at night so I did use flash. The after picture was taken this morning with natural light. The dishwasher did NOT change the shade of yellow on the Chevron mug, that is due to my light source. The dishwasher DID however fade away several of the polka dots from the regular Sharpies.

Conclusion: regular Sharpies are NOT dishwasher safe, but the paint Sharpies are!!!

You might see some bleeding of the yellow and think my edges aren't that crisp. That is NOT what it looked like when I finished with the rubbing alcohol. I'm not sure if the oven or dishwasher did that. It's a little bit fuzzy but I'm okay with it. I am still so excited and pleased with how it turned out! Also very happy that the yellow really contrasts with the white unlike the regular yellow Sharpie.

What do you think? Would you try this? If you do, let me know how it goes!

Thank you to Emily at Scribbles from Emily for the tutorial!

As you saw in my post earlier today, I did buy the pack for my students and I am excited about the cute mugs they will create for their reading teachers!

I've linked up at the following parties: