At CONvergence, one of the crafts they did in the kids' area was making necklaces out of bottlecaps. It was pretty cool and something I thought we could replicate at home. But as I didn't want to drill tiny holes in the bottlecaps for the jump rings, we did magnets instead!
(Yes that is a Halloween-themed tablecloth. It was what we had that was plastic, and I was pretty sure that things were going to get messy!)
I used a 1" hole punch to get circles that fit perfectly inside the bottlecaps. (I got a whole bunch of bottlecaps for free from the Rusty Taco, which sells bottles of Jarritos and Mexican Coke. They let me just scoop them out of the little collection box. They weren't perfectly flat but they worked just fine. We just needed to wash them!) Then I brushed on some Mod Podge and the girls filled in the circles with beads and sequins.
We used all kinds of beads, both regular little seed beads and some larger shaped ones. We also had snowflake-shaped sequins as well as regular colorful circle ones.
When the girls had their bottlecaps the way they wanted them, we filled in the caps with this crazy stuff called Mod Podge Dimensional Magic, and let them dry for 24 hours. The Dimensional Magic dries clear and holds everything together... it was super easy!
The only thing I didn't care for was that reviews online suggested that it would not shrink down as it dried, and it totally did. It shrank sort of weirdly, too, and some bubbles seemed to appear when I was super careful to pop any bubbles before we let them dry. So it wasn't the exact effect I was looking for. But still, it worked just fine to hold everything together.
Once the Dimensional Magic dried, I used rubber cement to glue 3/4" magnets on the back of the caps.
The rubber cement may have been overkill - the magnets were actually adhesive. But I wasn't confident that the adhesive would be strong enough, because some of the caps were really very full of beads.
So once that dried, voila! Final product:
The girls are super proud of them! They like to play with them on the fridge, and also gave some to beloved neighbor Beth for her birthday.
I think they look great! I will say that the ones that the girls did that are completely full of beads and sequins look way better than the ones I did that were a little more sparing with the decoration. So, lesson learned: this is a craft for making over-the-top decoration.
It was fun and definitely something we'll repeat!
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