Remember the other week when I posted about this craft featured in Country Living? Well, this past weekend I bought some mugs at Pier 1 and tested it out.

Here are a few tips I learned from the process:

1. Put your first coat on thin.  I initially did it fairly thick and the paint ended up drying on the stencil in spots and not taking to the mug.

2. After painting, remove stencil. This sort of plays into tip number one. After I did the first coat, I left the stencil on and applied the second coat. When I went to remove the stencil a few hours later, some of the paint peeled off the mug because it was mainly adhering to the stencil.

3. Embrace imperfection. I guarantee the people at Country Living went through 87 mugs before they had those five perfect images to display in a photo op. Embrace the flaws. If you’re a perfectionist I recommend you only look at the mugs from far away; or you could only drink cocktails out of the mugs—that way you’ll have blurred vision and won’t notice imperfections! Genius.

4. Crabs are tough! Think long and hard about whether or not you really want a crab mug. Those legs are killer…

5. Don’t use the mugs right away. Most ceramic paint will tell you to wait 10 days. Follow this advice, otherwise you’ll wash away all your work!

So those are some tips for crafters who attempt to do this in the future. Here’s a photo of how mine turned out:

I did two crabs, a pig and a cow. I have to say the crabs are my favorite. Maybe it’s because of all the blood, sweat, tears and wine consuming that went into making them.

UPDATE: I accidentally washed one of these mugs in the dishwasher and the paint came off.