Bottle Cap Projects

Hey there! So, new fun things I'm working on, painted and embellished bottle caps!!  I've always loved the idea of recycling and reusing trash or discarded objects to make fun new projects.  So, bottle caps seemed a perfect project.  I made some fun ones over a year ago that I've wanted to try to recreate, but, haven't gotten back into clay yet.  They bake well, though, so I'm hoping I'll find some fun new things to make.  I might re-do the existing ones to make them nicer.  (Possibly sell-able??)  Anyway, here are some new things I came up with.

A few tips, first.  So, I bought a silicon mat/pot holder thing to help me after the first round of terrible pounded out caps, but, no go on that, either.  So I gave up on hammering.  I have a regular hammer, not a rubber mallet.  I feel like one of those would work best, but, this method I use works perfect for me, and is more controlled, and you can customize it much better, in my opinion.  I just use round and regular? jewelry pliers.  These ones.  I used both.  Anyway, I just used the tip of the non-round ones and lifted up one of the edges of the side and alternated around the entire cap until the edge fanned out a bit.  Then, I took my round pliers and pulled it out more, to even it out, and to curve it back just a little.  Then I took my Xacto blade and lifted the plastic seal out of it.  It doesn't matter if you scratch the cap if you're just painting over it or putting an image in there, but for some of them, I had to be really careful to not scratch it.  It isn't that difficult, just took a more careful hand.

I used regular dish soap and a scrubby pad with bristles to clean them up and make them shiny.  I found that PBR caps and Heineken caps work best for my purposes, but feel free to experiment!!  If you're using acrylic paints, I used several coats of paint to get a nice opaque cover.  The image is the most difficult part, really, to size it down and still have it clear and sharp, but that depends entirely on your skills with images.  I've seen fun stickers and things that fit into bottle caps as well at craft stores, or you can draw your own!  I've used a combination of printed images and hand drawn applications to clear mine up.  Here's some fun photos!

Here's the back of the PBR cap, a custom order.  Clear gloss and made extra shiny!

Here's the "front" of the cap, I filled in the heart, and painted it to make it fancy :)  Filled with epoxy for durability.

So this picture is really blurry, but, I really like how it turned out.  My photographer is out of reach at the moment, so I'm stuck with cell phone pics,  Woo. 

Another custom order, a Vault Symbol from the game, Borderlands 2.  Simple, hand painted, but really cool.  I am going to make one in the red/yellow next for myself! 

Sizing the image before settling.  I painted the whole thing BEFORE gluing the image down, because the colors matched, and I wanted the epoxy to set in correctly and not leak under.