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No Drive to the State Fair is Complete without a Personalized Coffee Mug





Summer time is the time for county fairs and the great state fair. As a kid I can remember being loaded up in the family sedan and driving to the State Fair every summer. It was an all-day occasion. There were rides to ride, exhibits to see, carnival games to play, and, of course, a multitude of food to eat. One of my fondest memories is going through the variety of booths where vendors of all sorts would be hawking their wares – from beef jerky to new tubs. And one that persistently stood out to me as the cheesiest, and for that reason the most fitting for the State Fair, was the booth where you could have a picture of your choice put on a personalized coffee mug.

New Meaning to the phrase Mug Shot

We regularly had to avert and look at the sample mugs and talk about who we could send a group to for a Christmas gift. Generally, it was to someone we weren't very close to or we didn't like awfully much. Of course, my grandparents were not in either of those categories and I regularly thought they would love a cluster of personalized coffee mugs with our pictures on them. But I was always voted down, being the youngest in the family and all.

Still, the procedure fascinated me – how did they acquire that photo on the mug? At first the procedure was virtually low-tech. It involved merely sliding a photo behind a clear plastic sleeve wrapped around the mug. The sleeve was hence sealed and the picture was protected behind the plastic. These mugs did not go more than enormously well since, no matter how they were sealed, it didn't take long for moisture to seep in behind the plastic and ruin the photos.

The next generation of personalized coffee mugs used a more advancing process of lamination and this seemed to work better. The photos stayed protected better and the mugs were more good-looking.

With the arrival of the computer age, came a quantum leap in personalized coffee mug technology. Now any kind of photo can be downloaded onto a computer, printed out and affixed to almost any kind of coffee mug. Photos can also be screen printed onto mugs, opening up the doors to creativity, creating your imagination the only limit to what can be inserted on a personalized coffee mug. They still are a bit cheesy, but the memory of where the technology started will live fortunately with me forever.