Bottle Caps!

So I've been collected bottle caps for the past year or so. I started out just keeping a cap of everything I tried, which kinda led me to start trying more and more different things. But as with most people I have certain drinks that I prefer and I thought "What could I do with all these caps?" I remembered seeing a checkers set that my dad had made once out of epoxied pepsi and dr pepper bottle caps and figured I'd try my hand at it. So I've been collecting more and more over the past six months or so and filling certain ones with epoxy.

I'm proud to say that this past weekend (with lots of help from Ricci's Gramps and her dad, Bill) I made my first checker board. Gramps helped with the design and did most of the sawing with Bill. I actually only helped in that part. But I watched carefully so that now I can do it myself. Then I painted the squares and stained the whole thing to look old. I'll put pictures up later. Assuming that the last couple caps finish drying by this evening I will have a full set to play "Corona Extra" against "Corona Light".

Quick Disclaimer: I drink beer from time to time, but I don't get drunk. I think the Bible is pretty clear that being drunk is sinful, but drinking in itself is not. I don't hang out at bars either because of the associations people sometimes make. Nuff said.

Moving on, my general policy is to take the first bottle cap I get from a drink and add it to my collection. After that I just add duplicates to another jar/ziploc/whatever container I'm using. I hope to have some way to display them one day but for now they sit in a closet. As I was sorting out a batch of bottlecaps my in-laws had saved for me (yeah I sort them, order is a good thing) I was feeling pretty good about my collection. I knew it wasn't the biggest but I was kind of proud of my modest little collection.

Then I stumbled across Bottle Cap-O-Rama and was put to shame. I probably have between fifty and a hundred different bottle caps. Whoever runs this site (I would assume a guy, but there's a girl on the top banner so I'm not sure...) has nearly 2500! Wowsers! Looks like I have a ways to go.

Also he/she had links to John T. Unger's bottle cap mosaic fish site. Awesome. I watched the video of how he does it and it looks pretty tedious. It seems pretty steep to charge $500 for some wall art but as I learned this weekend making that checker board, hand made stuff is expensive and time consuming for the person making it. Granted, he doesn't buy all the beer himself, but the wood, metal, and nails plus the time and energy he puts in definitely make it worth more than you might think on first glance.

Back to Bottle Cap O Rama, I haven't quite finished absorbing all attainable knowledge from their "links" section so I may post more.

I also started my training class at work on Adobe Photoshop so look to better designs for this page in the future and less bleak cyber wastelands.

*update*
I just found a link from BCoR to bottlecaps.de and it made me slightly more depressed about my collection. hundreds of thousands.....