"Found Bottle Cap Charms – from Deborah Berry, Berry Patch Designs
1. I gathered the cream soda and root beer bottle caps from my oldest daughter’s bedroom floor and mulled my project over. I enjoy Found Art, and her bedroom is a treasure trove for the that.
2. Just a little peeved that she went back to school (she’s in college) and left her bedroom such a pigsty, again, I grabbed the hammer and vented my frustrations on these hapless little bottle caps. One at a time, on a rug over a concrete floor, I laid them out and smashed them flat, first one side, then the other. My husband wanted to know what the ^%$@! noise was and my 13-year-old told him "Mom’s smashing bottle caps…" He simply grunted, she snickered and I kept hammering.
3. I had to pull the rug fibers out of the smashed edges of a few – kind of made me think what happens when you throw your jeans on real quick and zip up with no underwear – youch! I have an ex-husband who did that, so ripping out those fibers was sadistic therapy!
Now I had something I could respect: little wopper-jawed shaped disks with interesting bumps and hammer marks, something that had obediently submitted to my anger and ended up useful!
4. Next came the spray paint –I blasted them black, front and back, still not really knowing what they would turn into.
Because I have cats (or rather, cats have me), I carried them into the house to dry. I could imagine one of the silly buggers rolling onto the paper and coming away with black, metal dots in her fur. Funny image, but not with my bottle caps!
While they lay on the table drying, I spotted some vintage clipart images and old envelopes with handwriting. Hmmmm….. an idea is forming….
5. I grabbed fancy edged scissors and cut lots of little disks of images and snippets of handwriting and began gluing them down with decopage glue. After covering one side of each, I went to bed and had dreams of dozens of lovely charms draped from my fat, lovely neck!
Over the next days I glued images on both sides of the bottle caps and layered decoupage repeatedly, I think there’s at least four layers now. I lost count. I used Lennea’s awl to poke a hole in each. Aren’t they lovely?
At some point in this stretch of time the 13 year-old commented on how stupid my bottle cap charms were – I stuck my tongue out at her (this is a crucial step in the process). Later, I caught her examining them more closely, the cogs spinning in her little adolescent brain and just before leaving for Artiscape, I caught her rummaging through my lovely little charm stash and she asked me to save one for her! Hah!
1. I gathered the cream soda and root beer bottle caps from my oldest daughter’s bedroom floor and mulled my project over. I enjoy Found Art, and her bedroom is a treasure trove for the that.
2. Just a little peeved that she went back to school (she’s in college) and left her bedroom such a pigsty, again, I grabbed the hammer and vented my frustrations on these hapless little bottle caps. One at a time, on a rug over a concrete floor, I laid them out and smashed them flat, first one side, then the other. My husband wanted to know what the ^%$@! noise was and my 13-year-old told him "Mom’s smashing bottle caps…" He simply grunted, she snickered and I kept hammering.
3. I had to pull the rug fibers out of the smashed edges of a few – kind of made me think what happens when you throw your jeans on real quick and zip up with no underwear – youch! I have an ex-husband who did that, so ripping out those fibers was sadistic therapy!
Now I had something I could respect: little wopper-jawed shaped disks with interesting bumps and hammer marks, something that had obediently submitted to my anger and ended up useful!
4. Next came the spray paint –I blasted them black, front and back, still not really knowing what they would turn into.
Because I have cats (or rather, cats have me), I carried them into the house to dry. I could imagine one of the silly buggers rolling onto the paper and coming away with black, metal dots in her fur. Funny image, but not with my bottle caps!
While they lay on the table drying, I spotted some vintage clipart images and old envelopes with handwriting. Hmmmm….. an idea is forming….
5. I grabbed fancy edged scissors and cut lots of little disks of images and snippets of handwriting and began gluing them down with decopage glue. After covering one side of each, I went to bed and had dreams of dozens of lovely charms draped from my fat, lovely neck!
Over the next days I glued images on both sides of the bottle caps and layered decoupage repeatedly, I think there’s at least four layers now. I lost count. I used Lennea’s awl to poke a hole in each. Aren’t they lovely?
At some point in this stretch of time the 13 year-old commented on how stupid my bottle cap charms were – I stuck my tongue out at her (this is a crucial step in the process). Later, I caught her examining them more closely, the cogs spinning in her little adolescent brain and just before leaving for Artiscape, I caught her rummaging through my lovely little charm stash and she asked me to save one for her! Hah!
1 comment:
Oh Debbie, you always keep me laughing! LOVE your bottle caps. Are you now an official bottle cap therapist??
Lennea
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