F-ing Retirement Gift - Monogrammed Wine Glasses

Oh, my title just makes me laugh. You will see where it comes from as the post goes on. Nothing bad I promise.

A couple of months ago one of my biggest supporters for my blog decided to take a very early retirement. Kim is one of the nicest and funniest people you could ever know. Other than parents, I have not have not known anyone else to retire, so when it came to gift ideas I was stumped. As I always say, I knew I wanted her gift to be personal and something she could use but I had already made her the name art and the monogrammed tile, so I had to come up with something completely new.

After heading over to the amazingly inspiring Pottery Barn site, I decided on making monogrammed stemless wine glasses and marble tile coasters (I will share this simple gift idea tomorrow).

Source Pottery Barn

The Pottery Barn glasses are over $50 for 6, and I created mine for under $20 for 8. I purchased eight reasonably priced stemless wine glasses from a local home store so they can be for everyday use and no one has to worry about them breaking.

I tested out a few different initials on a old pickle jar just to ensure I had the right sizing and to see which design I liked the best. I knew I was saving all those jars for a reason. Hopefully now my husband can't say anything about the stash again. Are you the same... you look at jars and think "Oh I know there is something I can do with that in the future" and it hurts you to throw them in the recycling bin?

So here are the two 'F' designs I tried. Both fonts are Brock Script but one has a circle around it:

I liked them both, but I found the large circle to be a little heavy for wine glasses. I also find that with the etching cream, large surfaces don't seem to be consistently etched. It is hard to explain, but it looks like some of the areas are more etched. So I went with the scrolly F.  Do you see where the F-ing wine glass title came from.

I used vinyl cut with my Cricut to create the template to etch. If you don't have a machine to cut vinyl, you can do this with stickers or hand cut contact paper. I have in the past printed text and traced it with an exacto knife over contact paper to make my own.

If you can't get the vinyl to lay completely flat, use the technique described on my post for the NFL Beer Steins here.

I find it easiest to lay all the glasses out on a dish towel. This prevents the glasses from rolling around and the etching cream from running down.

Using a sponge brush, I apply the etching cream. I use a lot of etching cream! I really believe for this more is better. Be very, very careful not to get any one the outside of the stencil because it will start to etch immediately.

I leave the etching cream on for 20-25 minutes. I honestly do not know how long it is suppose to stay on because here in Canada, the back of the bottle with the instructions is covered by a million warning messages in two languages. It is funny.

For all of you who are cheap frugal like me, this is important to read: As recommended by a fellow blogger, I carefully remove the etching cream with my sponge brush and scrape it right back into the etching cream bottle! Yes, you heard that right...I reuse the etching cream!!!! I have been reusing this cream for months and have not seen a difference in the end result.

I then rinse the etching cream under water and remove the vinyl.

Once they were all washed and dried off, this is what they looked like:

Cute huh! I think this is going to be my 'go to gift' for Christmas this year!

What do you think? Would you like this as a gift?

Has anyone else made etched gifts?

Stephanie