A short tale of turning a blank slate into something beautiful. Of creativity and hard-workmanship. Or of just liking beer a lot. A bit different than my usual posts, but you might agree it’s a nice break in style.
I’ve been a fan of New Belgium for a couple years. One day, I randomly decided to start collecting their 6 pack labels–don’t really know why. For a while, I just taped them to my fridge, which was kinda cool, but over the Christmas break, I decided I wanted to do something a little craftier.
Somehow, the idea of cutting them into beer glass shapes popped into my head. I Googled “beer glasses” a couple times, and found this picture via an Image search (I think from here?):
Through some quick Photoshop trickery, I turned it into these:

Turned the colors way down using the fancy “Curves” tool–props to my buddy Bill Campbell for showing me how to do this!
After they were isolated and darkened, I printed them out on sheets of paper.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of pictures of this next part, but it was kinda difficult. Basically, I decided on a pattern I was going to use, traced it on the labels, and cut them out. Ended up with 4 of these:
I was originally going to make the glasses the width of the labels, but they ended up being a little wider than that, which made me get a little tricky with the edges.
Doing all 4 of them took a lot longer than I thought, and I ended up with a big pile of scraps.
Here is the final result of all the cutting!
Next, I needed to mount it on something, so I went and grabbed some cardboard-type stuff from Michaels, and a simple poster frame (cost about $30).
I decided to give it a simple background of the glasses sitting on a table, so I cut them out real quick.
A little bit of Elmer’s Glue later, tada!
A nice, simple design! Took a couple hours, was a nice way to use some beer labels, and is a nice little piece for the kitchen.
Hope this inspires you to get a little creative on your own, whether personally or professionally. Or maybe just to drink some beer!
Very cool idea Lee. I need to start collecting myself.
Thanks Ian! Even if you don’t know what you’re going to do with it just yet, you might be happy you started collecting :).