DIY Monogrammed Rocks Glasses

I have the hardest time figuring out what to get for dudes for Christmas.  Buying presents for guys is tough!  Girls are easy to buy for, I feel like I'm SUPER easy to buy for [all I ever really seem to want is some weird/creepy/goth type jewelry, but that never happens].  I find W especially hard to buy for.  He's just not into STUFF.  He does love booze tho, so I'm milking that for all its worth.

So this year for Christmas I monogrammed some rocks glasses for him, MYSELF.  It was actually surprisingly easy and cheap.  Since I'm always broke, the cheap factor was perfect, and the handmade part kept the gift from being totally lame.  So I bought three blank rocks glasses, if you wanna try it out similar ones can be found here and here.  I wanted to give him a set of two, but I bought three in case one got screwed up.  I ended up giving him all three anyway.

So I covered the area I wanted to monogram with painter's tape, and traced the monogram onto the tape.  I printed out the monogram I designed in Adobe Illustrator and used it as a stencil to draw on the tape.  After that I used an x-acto knife to cut the design into the tape, so the gray part in the image above was cut away and the glass was showing.  Then I painted a thin layer of Armor Etch over the design and let it sit for five minutes.  Rinse it off, pull of the tape and ta daaa! you have a custom monogrammed glass.  Of course, since I made one extra in case I screwed it up, I ended up with one perfect one and two equally janky ones.  I decided that since my design didn't etch perfectly that it was good thing.  Shows that it was handmade, right? Right?  Yeeeah. Well the design didn't come out PERFECTLY crisp but I think it still looks pretty rad.

Here's another [out of focus] picture.

So to present this gift, I took the labels off of an old cigar box, recreated the same monogram out of craft paper, and filled the box with craft paper crinkles.  Except I couldn't find craft paper crinkles so I folded regular craft paper into little accordions and cut them into little strips to make my own.  That part was probably unnecessary but I had the idea in my head so I kinda had to follow through. 

Yet another out of focus image, that old droid didn't have the best camera on it.

To go along with the glasses I also got him some whisky rocks.  They chill your whisky without watering it down.  All in all, I think it ended up being a pretty sweet gift.  W really liked them and he sent me this picture the first time he used one of the glasses.

Taken with the hipstamatic app, on top of some song lyrics.  What a hipster. [Ha!]