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Make your own custom water bottles with Cricut! Personalize your water bottle with unlimited design options for a truly unique look! Makes a great back to school project! 

back to school outdoors themed water bottles and lunch box

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Custom Water Bottles with Cricut for Back to School

It’s back to school time, and around here that means that it’s time to Personalize ALL the Things! Last year we customized some funny DIY lunchboxes with Cricut and this year we’re adding custom water bottles to the collection! 

We recently got back home from an epic end-of-summer trip to the Northern California coast, and I knew that I wanted to incorporate an outdoor adventure theme into my designs. I wanted to give my kids a reminder of how much fun we all had being immersed in the great outdoors and hiking among the redwoods, and I love the way that these turned out!

cricut maker and premium vinyl

What You’ll Need to Make Custom Water Bottles: 

premium vinyl in various colors

Cricut Premium Permanent Vinyl is perfect for water bottles because it is designed to withstand all kinds of different conditions and will last for up to three years or more! It’s the same type of vinyl used to add decals to cars (it even stands up to the car wash!) and numbers to mailboxes, so it’s meant to hold up to tough conditions! For these water bottles, I recommend hand-washing (because that’s the manufacturer’s recommendation for the bottle), but I have heard lots of anecdotal evidence of people running Premium Permanent Vinyl through the dishwasher with no problems at all! 

stainless steel water bottles made with cricut

I started with three blank stainless steel water bottles – two were straight-sided and one is the “wave” model with a slimmer neck. 

measuring water bottle for size

Use a measuring tape to determine what size your designs need to be. 

design preview over cutting mat in cricut design space

Open up your designs in Cricut Design Space and size the images appropriately. I set my designs at 4″ wide for the straight-sided bottles. 

front and side views of the same water bottle

The wave-shaped bottle requires a bit of extra effort. Applying a straight line to a curved surface doesn’t produce straight results, so you’ll need to add a bit of a curve to any text that will be applied to a curved surface to compensate. 

outdoor water bottle text design in cricut design space

We have previously talked about How to Curve Text for Tumblers, and with the wave-shaped water bottle, you will need to do the same thing. You can take the complicated route and create/scan a paper template of your water bottle into Design Space for a precise curvature measurement, or you can take the easier way out and simply play around with the curvature in Design Space until it looks correct. It’s fairly easy to eyeball the measurement without the extra effort of creating a template, but it may require you to cut a sample or two to get it right. For this water bottle, I kept “Worry Less’ at a zero curvature since it rests on the straight-sided part of the bottle, and I gave “Hike” a curvature of -50 and “More” a curvature of -53.  

cricut cutting adhesive vinyl

Use your Maker or Explore Air to cut the vinyl. 

weeding materials from vinyl on the cricut cutting mat

Use your weeding tools to weed the excess vinyl. 

weeded vinyl and weeding tool

I love, love, LOVE my Hooked Weeding Tool, so if you don’t have one yet, I highly recommend getting your hands on one!

peeling back layer to reveal weeded image

Cover the vinyl design with a small piece of transfer tape, burnish with the XL scraper, and peel away the backing paper. 

design and materials for adhering to water bottle
design overlayed onto water bottle and smoothing tool

Apply the vinyl to the water bottle and use the XL scraper to burnish before peeling off the transfer tape. 

completed outdoor water bottle featuring the great outdoors svg file on bottle

Ta da! Easy peasy! (And SUPER cute, right?!)

play outside svg file on ombre water bottle

Repeat the process for the other water bottles. 

cricut made water bottles
DIY outdoorsy themed water bottles

Remember that curved text? It looks perfectly straight on our curved water bottle!

cute outdoor water bottles for back to school

I added a California bear design to the other side of the bottle, and honestly, I might need to claim this one for myself and make another one for the kiddos! I LOVE the way this one came out! 😍  

ombre back to school tumblers and water bottles

Together, they make a super fun collection!

the great outdoors water bottle and lunch items

I hope that as my kids use these water bottles all day long that they’ll be reminded of our outdoor adventures and feel inspired to spend some more time playing outside (and less time in front of screens!). 

These custom water bottles are one of my favorite Cricut projects, and I’m feeling SUPER inspired by all of the different design options that you can make! I think I might need to make myself a custom water bottle to take to the gym, too!

Image of text that says Heidi

Check Out These Other Cricut Ideas!

Pin these Custom Water Bottles for Later!

DIY custom water bottles made with cricut

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11 Comments

    1. They are on Design Space. The images are:

      • The Great Outdoors – #M72FFF92
      • Mountains with Compass – #M71A3580
      • Bear – #M71A3504

      When searching in Design Space, make sure that you include the # symbol AND the number – using just the number alone will not fetch the proper results. Enjoy! 🙂

  1. These water bottles look amazing!! I have one quick question, did you remove the logos from the bottles or did they come without a label? If you removed it, how did you do it?

    Thank you!

    1. I purchased water bottles without logos and/or just used the side without the logo for the one that did have a logo. 🙂