mermaid milk bottle

Last week, the first pallet of custom milk bottles finally arrived on the farm. Getting them made was a long road for Allen - he asked an artist friend to design the label, and received a gorgeous, detailed pen and ink drawing. Good start. But then the bottle company insisted that the design had to be radically simplified, because their printers couldn’t render that much detail. And then the government’s raw milk regulators suggested that the standardized health labeling (raw milk is not pasteurized, stuff about microbes, etc.) should have a more prominent place on the label, and be printed in a larger font - basically, they had seemed to have no interest in or respect for the artistic integrity of the design. For a while, the whole thing was looking pretty thorny.

But then the bottles arrived, and they’re gorgeous. The green ink color, which Caitlin chose, sets off nicely against the creamy white of the milk. And although the design was greatly simplified, it retained much of it’s character. The one pitfall? The mermaid’s nipples. You can’t really tell in this picture, but they’re, um, a little target-like. There’s really no other way to put it.