I found thison Pinterest (of course) and knew that I had to try it. Etched sayings instead of wine charms? Cute *and* funny. Also, the perfect gift for my stepsister and her new husband. Michael has etched glass before so he walked me though it. I bought a 6 pack of cheap wine glasses from Ikea to use as the base and then sat down to ponder what should go on the glasses. I decided to go with Tipsy, Lush, Buzzed, Bent, Toasted and Loaded. I used SCAL software and cut the templates out of vinyl on my Cricut. Have I mentioned that I love my Cricut?
Obviously, you want to cut the words apart. Make sure you don’t lose any of the bits from inside the a, e, o, d, etc. Then you need to clean the glasses really well with glass cleaner. Apparently the oil in your fingers can screw up the etching stuff. Since I’m a hippy, we use Method glass cleaner instead of Windex.
Once your glasses are nice and clean, stick on the stencils. If the word is longer than 3 or 4 letters, I recommend cutting it in half. Also, it’s easier to get the vinyl to lay flat if you cut some slits up to the edge of some of the letters. Hopefully the picture makes this clearer. If you don’t want to mess with the curvature of the glass, you could always make your letters smaller and put them on the base of the glass.
Don’t forget to add in the little bits from the inside of the letters like “o.” When you’ve done that check your glass from the back to see if there are any obvious bubbles or gaps. I smoothed them down with a popsicle stick somewhat effectively. Mainly I used my thumb nail and tried to avoid touching the glass as much as possible.
Here’s the actual etching stuff. I think Michael bought it a few years ago at Hobby Lobby. It has a fairly intimidating list of warnings. We’ll just say that this is *not* a kid friendly craft and leave it at that.
You just gunk it on with a paint brush and let it sit for 5 minutes. Mine sat longer than that because I was doing all 6 glasses at once. There was no noticeable difference between these and my test glasses which sat for exactly 5 minutes. Don’t get it on your hands.
After (around) 5 minutes, you wash it off with water and peel off they vinyl. Et voila! (Is that right? I barely passed spanish and certainly never took french.) I think they turned out really nice! 🙂
