Wicked Christmas Moonshine Present

This is a guide to making a really cool home made Christmas present and applying artwork to a glass bottle of moonshine (or other beverage). The same method can be used for all sorts of non-alcoholic beverages, be creative!
I gave mine away as a Kris Kringle present and i would love to see what you can come up with.

Make some designs and get some ideas. I had a good idea of what I wanted, it had to be big and stand out as a dangerous beverage. I looked at some old fashion moonshine bottles in Google images and found a few skull and cross bones. A friend gave me a 2L glass grape juice bottle, which was the perfect size. I also found some big bottles of port in the liquor store for around $10 that would have worked just as well.

I used the software adobe illustrator and the website www.dafont.com to make the text look cool. The font is really important and sets the tone of the words, the fancy name for this is typography.

At first I was going to make the logo out paper and later decided to change to a vinyl cut logo. I used a Rolland CAMM-1 Servo GX-24 with the basic software Cut Studio. It comes with a really handy illustrator plugin that exports all the files in to Cut Studio. Just remember to make outlines of your text, otherwise it won’t work.

Alternatively, just print on some thick paper or card stock and cut out the shape with a very sharp blade, it just takes a little longer.

Test you label on a bottle. My first one was too big and out of proportion so I made another smaller one. I took note of the proportions and the join in the glass to locate the artwork in the best place.

For added detail I printed out a security label and bar-code. I would like to have also used the vinyl cutter for the bar-code, however it was much too thin and fragile, it just ended up breaking. 

The bar-code reads, "warning may cause death or permanent injury" and the number is 0 666666 666666. I used an existing bar-code from Google images. I could have drawn one from scratch, but why spend the time when there are heaps of bar-codes to choose from online. 

I used a reflective silver paper on the back of the bar-code to represent the silver security seal. I bought 2 spray cans, one fixative and 1 spray glue. I first used the fixative to seal the printed surface, then the spray glue to stick on the silver paper. Later the spray glue is also used to stick the paper to the glass bottle.

Apply your label and add your moonshine. My bar-code was much too stiff and would not curve around the bottle, so i used some scrap paper and rubber bands to shape it over night. My moonshine was brewed by a friend and the wood chips were filtered out with coffee filter paper. Everything came up looking really good and i took lots of photos, as below. I would really like to see your decorated bottles, please link pictures in the comments.

If you want to start from scratch there are lots of great moonshine guides on https://www.instructables.com and all over the internet.

This one is a Kris Kringle present, so I hope they like it!