An Artist Eye Turns Bottle Caps Into Magnets

Sometimes the best recycled art materials are ones that we see everyday.  Try collecting plastic bottle caps for a week with your family and you may be amazed at how you begin to notice the great variety of colors, sizes and designs on caps in your refrigerator and cupboard.  

Bottle caps make great materials for simple mosaics for children.  They collect quickly and can be assembled into all sorts of designs, suggesting faces, flowers and patterns.  Round shapes are happy shapes and a collection of bottle caps sorted by color can feel like a real treasure to a young creator. Begin by washing caps well, especially milk caps.  For very young children, put aside any that might present a choking hazard.  After that begin just playing with arrangements of caps and see what you can make or build.

A fun project is to make a bottle cap mosaic magnet.  Begin with a large flat lid to a coffee can or use a recycled CD for a base.  Arrange bottle caps in a pattern or design and then glue to the base.  Glue dots work well for this project as they dry instantly - you may also find strong double stick tape works well.  Extend the recycling by using an advertising or business card magnet to glue to the back of the CD to make a magnet.

You may be surprised how much variety there is in the colors, sizes and designs of the caps and in what you can create with them.  Children at Fort Hunt Elementary school collected bottle caps and made magnets as part of their Artist and Author night in May.  It was fun to watch the different strategies - color designs, looking for shapes to fit inside other shapes or free form with attachments extending off the base.

You can get together with your class, scout troop, or neighborhood and collect and sort caps together - then see what you can create.  It is always fun to get ideas working in a group.The photos come from the work of kids at Fort Hunt Elementary school.  Share your designs and new ideas here to inspire others.