Customized Water Bottles for Jungle Safari VBS

I have now been the VBS Coordinator for my church three years and I have learned a lot and mostly the hard way.  The first year, I kind of followed what the previous Coordinator did and when it came to the snack site, we had giant drink coolers with the little spigot that would leak and cups.  My experience was that it would make a huge mess and never mind the trash!

So last year I bought plain white water bottles with orange caps from Discount Mugs and used a sharpie to write on the child's name.  Then they were sorted into buckets and refilled each afternoon and kept in the fridge over night.  The kids loved them and didn't make any mess or trash.  They also got to take them home at the end of VBS.

This year, I had Miss V pick out a smaller sized bottle and the colors.  She picked out teal bottles with black caps.  When I opened them, I had a small panic attack....Black Sharpie would not show up on the dark bottles.  So I went to googling ideas. I have a Cricut Expression 2 and looked at hundreds of blogs to weigh the pros and cons.

Well I concluded that using contact paper instead of expensive vinyl would work for our bottles.  I also saw that using cheap dollar store clear shelf liner works just as well if not better than expensive transfer tape.

Now....for the contact paper, I thought of just plain white and I know I have a roll somewhere.  Well....I cannot find it anywhere!  So off to Walmart we go and I found Zebra striped adhesive contact paper!  Woo hoo!

So I downloaded and installed Cricut Craft Room and got to playing. 

I used my Mickey Font since it is a nice thick font and will show up the zebra pattern better.  I then took a deep breath and cut a 12x12 sheet and started cutting....

Looks good so far!  Now time to transfer the names to the water bottles.  I just cut a strip of the clear contact paper and used my Cricut tools to scrape/press the names on.

This went very well, but....I used Standard Grip mats (the green ones) and it was a bit hard to get the extra paper off of them.  I went to Hobby Lobby and picked up a Light Grip mat (light blue) and that worked so much better!!!  I will go back and pick up a few more.  

Each group had their own bucket with their water bottles.  The kids really enjoyed the water bottles and one mom even told me how her son couldn't wait to come back because he had his own drink with his name on it. 

As much as I would love to have the bottle imprinted with the theme logo and church info, it is just to expensive and I don't have that kind of extra money in my budget.  I do think this is a great alternative.