I’m not always crafty, but when I am, I blog about it. Nobody would ever need this or want this, but I think it’s funny, so humour me. Maybe if I gave you a little context, you might find it a little funny.

Remember my first hackathon with Kevin, Kyu, and Saleh at MIT? Well, at the end of that, Saleh left with like ten bottles of Soylent, and Kyu now has a monthly subscription. He keeps his empty Soylent bottles displayed on a shelf in his dorm room, much like the typical college student might have a display of empty bottles of alcohol. Seeing Kyu stumbling around like a zombie with a bottle of Soylent in his hands is a more common occurrence than you would think, or so his roomies update me.

Now Kyu also has a white S’well water bottle that he carries around everywhere, and one day I came up with this genius idea: jazz up his white S’well water bottle to look like a Soylent bottle. Alas, he wouldn’t let me do it, and I wasn’t about to buy a new white S’well water bottle to bring my idea to life for him, but when I drew his name for Secret Santa, I had the perfect excuse to. He’ll probably never use this bottle because he has a perfectly normal white S’well water bottle, but I’m so proud of myself and maybe he’ll think it’s funny. At the very least, I think it’s funny and that’s all that matters in the end, right?

With all my materials in this cute lil O Bag (that I got in Italy and most often use as a lunch bag), I headed to the “courtyard” of our apartment in shorts and a t-shirt–a sight for sore eyes. (For the record, this was not a good decision. I froze my ass off. And my toes off.)

The white water bottle I got off Amazon is actually KINGSO, which is substantially cheaper than S’well. I don’t know anything about the quality of it, but the Amazon reviews are pretty good. I also got a bottle of black paint for stainless steel off Amazon. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any of these stainless steel bottles with black caps, so I needed to do this part myself.

To prep the lid for spray painting, I carefully covered the parts I didn’t want painted with masking tape.

With my gloves on, I sprayed the lid with a few coats of paint.

It dried pretty quick, but I didn’t want to take any chances, so I propped the lid up with thumbtacks and let the paint dry for awhile longer.

Soylent bottles are quite minimal. After the white bottle and black cap, the next important feature was the logo. I put a lot of thought into how I wanted to get the logo onto the bottle, including creating a stencil and spray painting the logo on (pros: longevity, cons: meticulous process) or drawing it on with a Sharpie (pros: quick and easy, cons: not very precise, might not stay), but ended up deciding to create a custom sticker with Print Runner, which was the cheapest option I could find. To design the sticker, I found an image of the logo online and added “400 kcal” myself with a font that looked similar to the logo, which was Sugo UltraLight.

I’m so happy with this combination of the snow trees gift bag and the flurry on red tissue paper from Paper Source! Coincidentally, the pack of holiday cards I got also matched well with the gift wrapping.

Ta-da! I worried that the sticker would look too big on the bottle, because the smallest dimensions I could get the sticker printed in was 2″x2″, but now I think maybe it wasn’t such a big deal to have an oversized logo on the bottle. It’s the whole point of the joke after all! So really, maybe it’s better to have an oversized logo to emphasise the ridiculousness of Kyu drinking Soylent all the time.

Soylent plz sponsor me/him ?

How are your Christmas gifts coming along?