Sharpie Decorated Mugs - Fail!

I'm going to take a stab and guess most people like to save a few bucks, especially when it comes to the holidays. We seriously can't afford to spend $50 plus on each person, or even half that sometimes. So I found this seemingly great idea off Pinterest for Sharpie Decorated Mugs. I figured this would be an awesome project for my son to do for the grandparents - cheap, creative, and personalized. Sounds great - right? WRONG!

The entire project cost about $16 for all 4 grandparents - $10 for 4 mugs and $6 for a packaged of colour sharpies both from the Superstore. If you search around Pinterest you'll see many links for this project and all are the same. Buy mug, wash mug, decorate mug with sharpie, bake, and TA-DA! Until you wash it...

After washing the mugs I let Munchkin go crazy with the Sharpies all over the mugs. He had a blast. As he'd draw something I'd ask him what each thing was and wrote it down on the mug (dog, cat, mommy, dinosaur, etc). The colouring took a couple sessions for all 4 mugs since my son has the attention span of a gold fish - again, he's 2!

 Looking neat - Right?

After we finished the colouring the mugs looked great and I was really excited. Then we baked them at 350 for 30 minutes as instructed. And that's when the problem started.
1) The colours seriously faded - big time. Especially the yellow which turned some sort of gold-brown colour. Not super attractive
2) As a Pinterest-craft rookie I should have done more research about the project. One of the major failings of this craft is the ink comes off with washing - or in our case, by rubbing your finger on it...lightly. We even re-baked the mugs at 350 for an additional hour and it still came off.

And....fail

So all and all I really was hoping this project would work but it didn't. I thought about trying again with new mugs and Sharpie Paint Pens but those were way too messy and too expensive for my dreams of a cheap(er) Christmas gift.