Painted Wine Goblets

I've been blessed to have met some truly wonderful women over the past few years of my life. I haven't even hit the thirty mark yet, and I have to say that until I reached my twenties I never had much luck meeting other females that I could be friends with.

Now I have some amazing women friends and we all share a love of wine. When we get together it's a constant and hilarious battle over who's glass is who's and we're always snagging each others wine and no one knows (or seems to care) if they're drinking from the wrong cup.

In honor of our wine-loving ways and to reduce confusion, I decided to paint up some wine goblets for myself and the three friends that I find myself sharing wine with the most as Christmas gifts. I've never painted glasses before and only had a vague idea of what I was doing, but as you'll see, the results were pretty fabulous and it was very, very easy despite being very time consuming.



A lot of the directions I found surfing the web tried to convince me I needed special acrylic paints designed for glass, but I'm stubborn and was convinced the multitude of paints I already owned would probably do the job. I was right.

First off, I went to the local thrift store and found some nice wine goblets. It only cost me a little over three dollars and I loved the glasses I got. Perfect for my piratical sugar skull theme.

I laid one of the glasses on a piece of paper and traced around it to get an idea of how big I wanted my images to be. I then drew out all the pictures on paper with a pencil in nice bold lines and then cut the images out so they would fit into each of the glasses.



I then washed each glass and dried them thoroughly to make sure they were all shiny clean for painting. I didn't want to tape the template images into the cups, so I stuffed them with packing paper to hold the images in place.

The next step was just to paint directly over the lines of the images in the colors I wanted using very tiny brushes. This part was very hard at first. The inside images weren't pressed completely flat against the glass, and the depth perception factor was a little wonkey, but I stuck with it. Once I had some of the basic black-line work finished, it became easier.



Once each of the glasses were painted with their skull images, I turned them around and painted each one with my friends' nicknames. I painted a little phrase that reminded me of them on the base of the glass and then flipped them over and, using a coordinating color from the main images, completely painted the underside of each base.



I let the glasses dry overnight and then baked them in the oven for thirty minutes at 300 degrees. I placed the glasses in a glass baking pan and in the oven before preheating and started the thirty-minute timer. Once the thirty minutes was up, I turned the oven off and let the glasses cool without taking them out. This way they wouldn't get heat or cold shock and shatter.

The glasses turned out beautifully. The only thing I should have done differently was, I should have baked them upside down. When I went to take the glasses out of the pan, the paint on the bases had stuck to the pan and I almost had a panic attack thinking it would ruin the paint, or even worse, break the glass. A little patience and some wiggling got them out, but it was a close thing and my glass suffered some paint chipping around the edges.

Otherwise, it was a grand adventure and I think I might start making some more of these and selling them in my Etsy shop in the future.

If you've never tried painting glasses, I highly recommend it. They make great gifts.