This year Chris and I gave a bunch of hand-painted mugs as Christmas gifts. I saw the idea/tutorial from Wit & Whistle a few months ago on Pinterest, and I was really pleased with how mine turned out! I used the same herringbone pattern in the tutorial, and I also tried to come up with a few of my own. That part was harder than it sounds, because they had to be patterns that were easily free-handed with a shaky hand and uneven paint applicator. Several of my ideas had to be discarded, though I do like the two I ended up using.
I got plain white mugs from cb2 and gold, black, and copper paint from Blick. This is one of those handmade gifts that was fun to make at first, but after 2 or 3 I was kind of over it. It's always good to keep in mind when you're planning handmade gifts in larger quantities that some things are not so fun the 7th time around!
We paired the mugs with hot chocolate from Ticket Kitchen. Of course I had to get some for Chris and me too so that we could make sure it was worthy. ;) Man oh man that stuff is good! We really loved it and I was sad I was giving the rest away because I wanted to keep all of it for us.
I'm Leah. I love making pretty things with fabric, paper, and sometimes, pixels and fonts. These days, though, it's mostly fabric. I also love tv on dvd and sometimes I talk about my cats too much. I live in Alexandria, VA, with my husband Chris and our son Joey, who was born on Christmas Eve last year. Chris is a musician in The US Army Band "Pershing's Own", and I make 
