Bottlecap Art

This craft developed out of my dad's love of soda sweepstakes. He always has me enter the codes for him, and as many caps as I come across, one day I decided to just start collecting them. Before I knew it I had a bucket-full and I actually hadn't come up with a plan for their use, but just decided to start something without thinking about it too much. The result:

You may be looking for some explanation.
I belong to an online collaborative art community called hitRECord (the red circle is our symbol, if you will.) Artists upload their 'records' (works of theirs - images, text, video, audio, etc) so basically at the tip of my fingers I have all of this artwork I adore. I had been collecting smaller caps (Coca Cola caps in the middle) and larger caps (Powerade/Minute Made caps surrounding.) The main crafting part of this is the larger caps, which I laid out and spray painted navy blue. I then chose 64 images that I loved and created a circle template to resize them all to, then printing them out and cutting them. The final step was mod-podging the paper to the caps.

This isn't the final result because my original intentions were to hang them on a wall and I still haven't figured out the best way to do so.

Future rehashing of the same craft: When I first started collecting the caps, I had an idea of making one large mosaic, painting caps accordingly so that from afar you would see an almost pixelated image. I couldn't decide on one image though, but it is an idea I would like to try in the future. I cut all the circles by hand because there weren't sized punches at my local Wal-Mart and I was already knee deep in the project (read: impatient.) In a future endeavor I would buy a sized punch that matches the caps' size and perhaps just use pretty scrapbook paper on the lids, in no specific fashion. We'll see.

Hope you found this interesting and let me know if you try/have tried something similar!

xoxo erikah