DIY Swag: Bottle Cap Pins

This was actually our first attempt at homemade swag, and both my daughter's first foray, and my own first foray (as an adult), into bottle cap creativity. One of our caches has a bottle cap theme so we made some themed trinkets for the initial hide. The end product here came out nice enough and the people who found them were happy, but I know we could do better. We learned a lot here and applied that to the bottle cap magnets that we made later on.

Completed pin (in yellow) top view and reverse view and lesson-learned view.

We had the crafting tools — the large paper punch and the metal jewelry punch — already, but if you need them you can get them at Michael's or Amazon. Not including those special tools, these came out to 32¢ apiece. Here's a shopping list of what you'd need to more or less duplicate what we've made:

• Bottle caps + clear epoxy protectors (ebay, 50 for $12.94 = 26¢ each)
• Large safety pins (Walmart, 50 for $2.99 = 6¢ each)
• Printed button faces (free)
• Spray adhesive/rubber cement (meh)

The face of the pin was designed in InDesign and printed on my laser printer on plain paper. We used a 3/4" round punch to cut them out, applied rubber cement to the back, and stuck it to the face of the bottle cap. The caps themselves come in a huge variety of colors and patterns; we opted for a mix of blue, yellow, orange, and green to match the (old) geocaching logo. We used a metal jewelry punch to create two holes on either side of the cap, then put a safety pin through it. Finally we covered the top of the button with a 1" self-adhesive clear epoxy protector.

Lessons learned:

• We first tried to use spray adhesive on the back of the punched-out paper discs but we ran into a few problems. The pressure of the spray was making the discs fly everywhere, but more importantly there just wasn't enough adhesive power to keep them affixed to the cap after the protector was put on. So we removed them, coated them with rubber cement, reaffixed them, then set a heavy book (yay Tolstoy!) on top to keep things flat while the glue dried.
• The epoxy protectors were a better idea on paper than in reality. They never stayed flat on the buttons, always curling up on the edges. Or, so it seemed. The button has a slightly rounded crown and the protector wants to be flat, so the end result is a slight gap around the edge.
• The metal jewelry punch is a pain in the ass to use on the multi-curved edges of the bottle cap and was often getting hung up on the folds in the cap's metal.

The magnets we made later came out much better.