In my last post I had mentioned that we brought our own water bottles onto the Disney Cruise to use outside of dining hours.Well, I got really ambitious the week before the cruise and decided to surprise my family by making them water bottles with their name and favorite Disney character on it. I got this idea from House of Hepworths. 

I borrowed a silhouette machine from a friend to do this project and I never want to give it back. I love this machine!

I started this project by leaving a cryptic message on Facebook asking all my family that was going on the cruise to post what their top two favorite Disney characters were. This was fun because they knew I was doing something but had no idea what it was. 

I downloaded a free Disney font to use for the text on the water bottle. 

The Disney characters that I used came from a Google image search. I got the best results with the images that were coloring book pages or cutouts (basically the ones with no backgrounds). You need a medium – large image file for this to work. You can sort your results by image size (on left sidebar). I saved the image to my computer and opened it in Silhouette Studio. 

I am not going to give you a step by step on how to do the rest. I am just going to direct you to this amazing YouTube video by Sarah’s World that I used. 

Here are a few tips that I have after making eight of these water bottles: 

• Find images with fatter lines. If the lines get too thin they don’t stick very well and are also a lot harder to weed the middles out. I ended up redoing Stitch and Peter Pan after the cruise because they were starting to peel away. The second time around I really increased the line size.
  
• The less detail in a character the better. A lot of the newer characters don’t work as well because of all the detail. For me Stitch and Wall-E were the hardest and Mickey and Donald were the easiest.
• Peeling away the vinyl is time consuming and requires patience. I love detailed work like this but some don’t.