What Crazy People Do with Bottle Caps

Do you watch Hoarders? It's so creepy and sad, right? The hoarders always have traumatic experiences that fuel their need to keep everything, and their belongings seem to be attached to their nerve endings with invisible threads, causing physical pain when removed.

Well, The Frugal Hostess has a secret.  She is a junior hoarder.  TFH hoards the following items:

- Back issues of Martha Stewart Living.
- Evening bags.
- Craft supplies.
- Bottle caps.

Everything on that list is pretty normal.  Well, maybe except the bottle caps.  So she decided to make something out of them to PROVE that there was a good reason to save them.  There is an ugly electrical panel in the kitchen that is too big to be covered with a painting, so this happened instead.

Here is a tiny fraction of the hoard.

Here are the bottle caps sorted by color.

TFH taped out the size of the "mosaic" on the coffee table to lay out the design.  Pro Tip: don't do this.  Masking tape is a pain to clean off.

It was supposed to be water with a little island, a palm tree, and sky with a bright sun.

See, this is the palm tree and the sun.  Yeah, FruHo thought it was dumb, too.

So, after she glued magnets to the back of almost 500 bottle caps, she changed the design to be a more abstract rainbow-type thing.

Here's a close up.  Cool, right?

FruHubs was surprisingly not too furious with the whole thing, although he did whine a bit about having caps from embarrassing beers up there (looking at you, Bud Light and Leinenkugel).  Some caps have since been changed out to protect his beer snob rep.

If you should ever decide to do this yourself, here are a few notes.

1.  Order your magnets online; they are SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper that way.
2.  Don't expect the glue to stick forever.  FruGo used the famous Aleene's Tacky Glue, and several magnets have come unglued.  They still stick to the metal panel, though, because that's how magnets work.  Hello.
3.  If you make a rainbow like the one above, use complete rows of one color rather than having the colors flow into each other mid-row.  It looks much better (and this one has since been altered accordingly).
4.  Beer?  Gives you back so much.