Personalized Water Bottles

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm preparing for my sister-in-law's bridal shower in a few weeks.  We are having a mimosa bar but wanted something for the non-boozers to drink.  Considering we'll be using champagne flutes for the mimosa bar, we didn't want to have to supply other cups for non-alcoholic drinks... so the Personalized Water Bottle idea was born!

I know you can buy personalized bottles and you can even buy just the personalized label to add to your own bottles - but there are plenty of sites with different ways to make them yourself.  I'm cheap  thrifty, so I decided I would make them myself.  I came across this post from a darling website called Glorious Treats with a simple way to make these.

Here's what you need:

Water Bottles
Scrapbook Paper
Packing Tape
Paper Cutter

To make the label itself, I just used my word processor (I have a Mac, so for me it was Pages - if you're a PC user, you can just use Word).  I was able to fit 5 labels to a page and I found that 8.5" was the perfect width for these bottles, which made it super simple (no trimming the paper on the sides)!  You'll want the height of each label to be just a little thinner than the width of your packing tape.  For example, my packing tape was 1.88"so the height of each label is 1.75"

I put a really light gray box around each label so I would know where to cut it.   Make sure to leave a bit of a blank space at one end since they'll overlap a little bit when you wrap it around the bottle.  I left a larger blank spot since I knew I'd be adding a sunflower sticker.  

I would recommend printing this out on a plain sheet of paper to test it our before printing on your scrapbook/colored paper.   Once you have the placement right, print it out on your scrapbook paper and use a paper cutter to cut out each label.  You can use scissors, but a paper cutter will insure that your lines are nice a straight.  Add stickers if desired.

The first step in assembly is to remove the existing label from your water bottles.  Try to find bottles with a label that's like a thin plastic, not paper.  The paper ones seemed to leave more of a sticky glue residue left on the bottle.  These ones with the plastic-y label came off really easily and left almost no glue behind.

Measure out a piece of packing tape that's about an inch longer than the label on each side.  The original blog said to lay the paper down and place a strip of packing tape over the paper.  I found it was easier to place the packing tape sticky side up on the table, then place the paper face down on the tape.  Again, you'll want the tape to extend about 1" on each side of the label and just a little bit at the top and bottom.

Line up the paper with the first ridge on the bottle (this will give you a nice guide to follow), stick down the extra tape on the end, and wrap the label around the bottle.

Hopefully you were able to wrap it straight around the bottle and you'll end up lined up at the other end.  If not, you should be able to pull off the label and start again.  Once you do this a time or two, you'll see it's pretty easy to get it straight.

And that's it!  Now, I'll warn you... I don't think these are necessarily water-proof.  So I wouldn't recommend throwing them in a big bucket of ice.  If you make the label a little smaller so the tape extend further at the top and bottom and is able to stick really well to the bottle, then it MIGHT be water-proof.  You've been warned.

Our plan is to keep these in the fridge and pull them out right before the guests arrive to the party.  Again, as I said in my last post... I'll take lots of pics at the shower and post how everything looks "in action."  Have a wonderful weekend everyone!