How I made a Mug

The Story Behind the Patterdale Hall Estate MUG!

By James Hurley

Mostly we take things for granted, its true. Consider the humble mug, the daily morning coffee is served in, its sat there in your cupbaord ready and waiting for you. But where did it come from, no not the shop, stop and consider this, who designed the mug, the position of the handle, the diameter of the mug, the tickness of the mug, how much fluid it can hold, is it wide enough to dunk a biscuit? The surface texture and what it feels like when you take a sip of that super morning coffee or afternoon cuppa.

Well yes I know, perhaps Im over thinking it, but I just trying to make a point, everything we use and take for granted was designed and made especially to serve a purpose. This is the same for the Patterdale Hall Estate mug that I created.

“Look a little bit closer, ponder on what it took to make the thing that you are holding in your hand and rekindle the desire to find out the hidden stories of the things you take for granted”

I make no claims for the design and construction of the mug itself, this was done by some clever geniue that obvioulsy enjoyed coffee or tea as much as I do. What I will do, is take you through a short summary of what went into the making of the Patterdale Hall Estate range of mugs and whay I made them.

The slide show above shows the steps in the creation of a sublimated mug:

Create a template that has all the key elements, such as colours to match the company brand, logos, website address and contact number. Ensure to leave space for the creative elements such as my fine art landscape photographs.
Ensure that your monitor is colour matched to your printer and you are using a printer profile that will recreate the same colours in print as shown on the screen, then print the design using a dedicate sublimation printer and paper.
Trim the print and attach it to the mug using heat resistant tape.
Preheat the mug and put it into a mug press.
Wait for the heat to trigger the transfer of the sublimation ink from the paper to the mug remove the mug, using gloves at it will be at around 180 degrees so too hot to hold.
Immediately peel off the paper and give the mug a light spray of water to stop the sublimation process.
Let the mug cool and move on to the next one.

From screen to a completed mug I would say takes 20 mins, so not time consuming.

The longest and most challenging part of the whole process is the design, it needs to be right and needs to bit fit for purpose. Once you have a template, its just a matter of printing and baking.

Sourcing copyright free images, or buying stock images is an option, but for these mugs I used my own fine art photographs, taken whilst in Ullswater. So you also need to take the image capture and processing time into consideration. Some of my photographs only take a few minor tweaks to prepare, others a few hours, fine tuning and colour correcting.

So that humble mug sat in your kitchen cupboard may have a story, it may have been handcrafted especially for you, just like this mug, or it may have just come off the shelf yesterday. Whichever it is don’t forget, even a humble mug has a story behind it.