Bottle Cap Cutes!

A quick and easy way to use up those old bottle caps! Cute as table "confetti" or embellishments on gifts! I'm sure you could find other uses for them, too.

Alrighty folks. Here's whatcha need:

Bottle caps! Glue gun, hemp-ish twine stuff (I have no idea what it's really called), permanent markers and pages with text. Oh, and scissors would be nice, too. Unless you want to try cutting the twine with your teeth. Good luck with that. The first step is to lightly coat the end of the twine, to prevent unruly fraying. Like so:

You will have to do the same thing with the other end once you're done spiraling it and it's cut. To start your spiral, begin in the middle of the bottle cap with a small bead of glue:

Then,

And now for the fun part... Decorating it to your taste! The possibilities are limitless when it comes to decorating them, but these are my favorite ways (after trying many, many things). Simple little hearts.

Or a wreath of torn (not cut) words from a book or magazine. (Again, I used Hardy Boys since there are so many at hand).

Voila! So cute, right??? They look very cute and classy with fan-flowers, too. Check it out:

Artichoke Lantern

My first tutorial! Even though there is absolutely NO sewing involved in this project, it's still worth sharing! What you need: Japanese Lantern (Mine was getting pretty beat up, so I decided to give it a makeover.) Glue gun, Pages from a book (I used Hardy Boys because my husband found a box of them by the dumpster) Scissors, Patience.

The first step is to cut about a bazillion of these. I will call them fish scales. They are only about 2 1/4 inches wide X 3 inches tall. Snip the bottoms twice as shown and voila.

Start on the bottom of the lantern. Using the excess paper from cutting the "fish scales", mask the hole and make 4-5 of these combs and apply to the hole's entrance, like shown below.

Glue 1 1/2-2 inch pieces all the way around, and then apply the scales. Make sure to space them about an inch apart all the way around, so that you can overlap the scales. Kind of like stacking sugar cookies. Once the scales are set, glue more 1 1/2-2 inch strips OVER the fish scale ends. The goal is to cover up all of the lantern and any imperfections. It should look like the picture above. Cut, clue, repeat. Repeat. And... repeat. It's pretty time consuming, so don't get discouraged if it takes a long time. The little decorative fan-flowers I used up top are miniature versions of a paper garland I found on projectwedding.com

Ta da! Mission accomplished:) Here is a picture of it in the dark... For the full affect.

The End. Happy gluing!

I Solemnly Swear.

This is me making a commitment to put together full-photo tutorials of all of my designs. This should be interesting. I am going to post pictures of my most recent projects, minus la instructiones since I was winging it and didn't bother to make patterns or log the many, many steps I took! I promise, I will do better in the future!

Mr. Pants, the Panther.

Sailor dress.

Rose skirt.

Ruffle butt!

Baby sweaters.

Della's blessing dress.

Della's dangly toy.