DIY Sharpie Mugs **Update 12.5.14 **

We've been doing a Christmas project after Thanksgiving for the past few years.  This year we decided to try these Sharpie mugs that are all over Pinterest.

I picked up some mugs on sale at Crate and Barrel:

Essentially what we'll be doing is decorate the mugs with dots of oil-based Sharpie markers around stickers.   There are all sorts of horror stories on Pinterest about the marker just washing off.  Turns out you need to use OIL-BASED Sharpie paint markers only.  Regular Sharpie markers are not water-safe.

Then I raided my stash of alphabet stickers.  Most of the mugs we saw were made using only one letter  as an initial .  Since we are over-achievers, we decided to go full on with a word or phrase.  Plus this way we can use these as gifts for anyone.  Of course if you know who you are gifting these to, personalized mugs are wonderful.

We had the best luck with foam stickers.   There was some bleeding under the sticker with the very thin ones.  Be careful about using flocked stickers - some of the flocking stuck to the adhesive and was very hard to remove.  (We know this, of course, because we did it!).

Pretty easy technique - stick on the letter/letters you want to use, making sure the letter is securely stuck to the mug.   Then shake up you paint pen and make a few test dots of scrap paper until you get the hang of how the paint flows.   The gold and silver paint seems thinner than the other colors.

Now just start making dots around your sticker.   Make the dots close together close to the sticker, then start to spread them out a bit as you move outward.

Feel free to do whatever moves you in the dots department - pretty sure you can't go to far wrong !  We made dots on the handle on some.

Mix it up and use more than one color, like the brew mug.

Remove the stickers and see how it looks.  With all that dot-dotting, some dots go astray or leak under the sticker.  We used a small artist paint brush  dipped in nail polish remover to erase the errant dots and remove any residual adhesive front the stickers.

There is a difference of opinion about whether the mugs need to be heat cured to ensure that the dots are permanent.   So we opted for the overly cautious approach:  Double bake them.  Put the mugs on a baking tray and into a cold oven.  Heat the oven and mugs to 450 degrees for 30 mins.  Cool and repeat.  Just to be even more cautious, we added this advice:

Here's the mug-decorating crew at work.  Aren't they very focused!

Boston Daughter, Austin Daughter and moi doing the dots.

These easy-peasy mugs make great gifts, assuming we can bear to part with them.

**Update**   Breaking news:  Texas Daughter (inadvertently) put one of her mugs in the dishwasher and the dots stayed dotty!  No washing off, no color fading, so guess the double-bake  did its job.  Yippee!

DIY Herb Salt

Fall garden clean-up is a sad business, but inspiration Pinterest  struck when I was ready to take in the herb pots.  Last year I discovered how to preserve herbs in frozen olive oil cubes and I did a few more this year.  I saw some pins for cute little jars of herb salt and voila, found my idea for Christmas gifts for The Captain's office staff.

The most difficult part of this was finding the jars.  I searched online and couldn't find anything that I liked.  Then while browsing at Le Roux, a local kitchen store,  I found the perfect little pot-belly jars. They didn't have quite enough, but had some sent down from their Portland store for me.   Sometimes I forget how helpful local brick-and-mortar stores can be!

The recipe for the herb salt is pretty simple and easily altered to personal preferences, herbs available, etc..  I looked at several different recipes and came up with my version:

   4 cups chopped herbs ( I used parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme - yes, like the song!)

   3 cups sea salt (I used a combination of kosher and sea salt since that's what I had)

You could add chopped onion and / or garlic or make an Italian flavored one with oregano, basil, parsley or any other combo that speaks to you.

First up - chopping herbs.  You could do this in a food processor, but I like the hands-on chopping better.  Seems somehow therapeutic.

Then mix herbs and salt:

Nest step is to dry the mixture a bit before packing into jars. You could spread it out on cookie sheets and let it air dry for 24 hours or so.  I spread out the salt mixture on parchment paper-lined cookie sheets and baked it at 200 degrees for two hours.   An added benefit of this method - the house smelled wonderful!

The salt will be a bit crunchy after baking.  I used a wooden spoon to break up the crusts.

Then, pour the salty goodness into jars- my funnels were too narrow so I used a rolled up piece of printer paper fitted into the jar - perfect.

Here are my sweet little jars full of herb-y, salty goodness.

Added hand-made tags with a wooden bead and some baker's twine and now the jars are properly festive.

I made three batches - it took two batches to fill the jars (twenty-five)  and then another batch for home in one of the empty sea salt jars.

Holiday gifts made before last minute panic - what a new, exciting concept!