Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Bottle Cap Pendant How-to

Lately, I've been having fun making these little pendants and thought I'd post a little how-to!
Here is what you'll need: UTEE, bottle cap, wire, pliers, scissors, heavy weight paper and image printed on heavy weight paper (this is important because thinner paper will absorb the UTEE.)
If you are using a bottle cap off of a bottle, you need to remove the plastic lining by heating it with a heat-gun and then pulling it off with pliers. Or you could buy them at a craft store which don't have the plastic in them. Once it's ready to go you need to cut out the paper to line the inside.

Trim your image down so that it'll fit inside as well. I like to cut the bottom so that it's curved and sits nicely in the bottom of the cap. At this point you can embellish it as you like, remembering that you will need to use heavy weight paper.

At this point you need to add your wire--I like to make a loop that twice the depth of the bottle cap. It needs to be a little long because you're going to bend it back. I use a glue dot to attach it to the top of the bottle cap. You really don't need to glue it down, but I like to just for security.

Turn your oven on to 250 and fill the cap with UTEE. When the oven is hot, put the cap in to bake, lining the sheet with some brown craft paper. Let it cook and watch the utee melt. You will probably need to do this step twice because as the the UTEE melts, it only will fill 1/2 the cap.

When it's all cooled off, use your pliers to bend the wire back so that it no longer sticks straight up. Add a jump ring and you're all ready to go!
Hope you enjoyed the how-to and as always, if you have any questions please feel free to email me!

2 comments:

Crafty Moira said...

I love this idea, but I can't quite tell how you did the wire loop. Is the wire inside the bottle cap and held in place with the UTEE?

Anonymous said...

is there a lot of yellowing? and have you tried this with any other metals??