The competition at work: to bring in the best coffee mug. Having a competitive nature of course I was going to go all out just for fun. Being an offsite worker all I had to do was submit photos, this worked to my advantage since I couldn’t even fit my final masterpiece through a door.
Anyway, here’s the process of how I made the mug and the many struggles I had.
First I found some large pieces of cardboard thinking this would be a suitable foundation to paper mache off of. Originally I had in mind to wear it with arm holes and such. I crafted the body of the mug with random scraps of the cardboard, taped it all together and carved a hole in the bottom for my legs.
I thought this was going to be a piece of cake. I started slapping on paper mache.
Well, things weren’t going very well. As you can see below the walls were beginning to cave in and the structure was too wet. I stayed confident it was going to work of course.
The morning after it was looking pretty pathetic. Since it was still pretty wet I tried wedging random objects inside to help it stand up, I was running late to start working so I had to grab random stuff fast.
I tried for a while later in the day paper macheing the inside but it was failing. So returned to the drawing board. I taped an entire new shell of cardboard around it to start over. No more leg holes, I decided I would just stand in it because it was becoming too heavy at that point. I wrapped paper around the new shell and called it good. Way easier. I went to the store and bought glitter spray paint.
That was a one whole can used. No way was I going to achieve the opacity I wanted without buying the stores stock. Additionally getting the thing outside was challenging and I had to bend it and rip it a little, it’s hard to see in the photo but the paper was toast. The paper was also too thin for what I wanted to glue onto it. So I dug around the garage and discovered a roll of rosin paper.
Rosin is thicker, sturdier and so much better to spray paint on. I ditched the glitter and got metallic.
I picked up some acrylic paint, feathers, tulle, other random embellishments, etc. and went to work on the rest.
I found a noodle that worked perfect for the handle. Easily cut out two holes and shoved each end in.
I spray painted the noodle and simply super glued some random stuff on. That’s it!
Of course it got disqualified even though I’m pretty sure you could still drink coffee out of this. In the end I won the best disqualified category, so it’s all good.
