Vintage Bottle Cap Plaque

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a giant collection of vintage bottle caps at a tag sale.

As I was sorting through them my son was admiring them and later when I went back into my room I noticed a pile of caps off to one side.

I asked him what they were and he asked me if I couldn't "do something crafty" with them because he really liked them and wanted to put them in his room.   Now, it's not too often a 20 year son guy asks you to make him something so I got right on it :)

I figured it would be easiest to display them on  a plaque of some sort so I dug around in my stash and found this board which was actually left over from a board book kit I had.  I decided to use a piece of vintage map paper for the background because these bottle caps come from all over the US and it would be great for a guys room.

I glued the paper down to the board using Collage Pauge from Aleene's but of course you could use any collage adhesive you like.

I then placed the map over the board and used my brayer to roll out any excess glue and/or air bubbles.

After it dried I sanded off the excess paper...

and inked it up with Old Paper & Vintage Photo Distress Inks for a nice worn feel to match the bottle caps.

Then came the fun part...

trying to find a pleasing arrangement of the caps!

I knew the 7UP pin would be in the center because it's the only odd piece in the mix.

(The pin was a promotion back in the 50s when the Disney Zorro movie came out!)

I just worked from the center out and this is what I came up with.

"Bob's" was an extra cool find because my son's name is Bob!

Now it's time to glue them all down. 

I used a bit of Loctite Go2Glue around the ruffly part of the cap which I figured if anyone ever wanted to take the caps off they could easily scrap the glue away.  This glue also has a 30 minute window in which you can move them around if needed which really came in handy for this project.

I worked from the Namar corner piece spacing each cap the same across and up in a grid pattern.  This is where the Go2Glue worked great.  I could tweak the spacing as needed w/o worrying about trying to hurry before the glue dried or having to pry the caps up and messing up the background.

By spending a little extra time in the beginning setting up this grid pattern it gave me an easy starting point for adhering the remaining caps.  By using the existing caps I could easily space the consecutive caps accordingly so I knew they would all come out evenly.

And here's where we're at...

This glue takes 24 hours to cure so I'll be back tomorrow and share with you what I'm going to do for the hanger ~ which at this point I'm not sure myself.