When Thomas and I first moved in together, two things were facts: We drank a lot of wine and beer and we needed art for our apartment that was cheap or free. So we figured out how to combine the two, and now are proud owners of some pretty cool looking art.
UPDATE: See our followup post explaining how to peel a label off a beer bottle.
Beer Cap Art
We used to always have beer stocked in our fridge and we always had people over to drink it. We would constantly find bottle caps around the house, and we started to see that we had a lot of different varieties and some of the caps were very cool looking. Thomas got the idea to make them into art. So we bought a large cork board, some super glue and some push pins. We spent months gathering beer bottle caps, gluing the push pins to the back of the caps and then pushing them into the cork board. All the effort was worth it though to have this unique piece hanging on our walls!
Beer Label Art
As we were collecting all different types of beer for the bottle cap project, we started to wonder if there wasn't something that we could do with the beer labels as well. Thomas' mom had left us a huge canvas when she moved, so we started using white glue to stick the beer labels on to it. It took us a long time to cover the front, and we found that some beer's labels do not come off easily, but the outcome is awesome. It is my favorite of the three projects. We still have to work on the edge of the canvas, and so it should be finished soon!
Wine Cork Art
We originally had bigger and grander plans for the wine corks that we saved, but in the end, I like what we ended up with a lot. We were already saving our bottle caps when I went to a house where someone had an entire barrel of wine corks in the dining room. A barrel! So we started collecting wine corks along with our bottle caps, and eventually we had enough to attempt to display them. I bought a cheap vase from Target and poured our mix of bottle caps and wine corks in, and it was instant art! Now we just throw in the caps or corks when we have beer or wine, so the art is slowly improving itself.
These art ideas make us sound like we are alcoholics, and I swear that we are not. It has take us years to collect the pieces required, but it has proven to be worth the wait for relatively cheap, unique art!
Does anyone have any other ideas on how to use beer or wine for art? We were saving wine bottles for a while, but they started taking up too much room, but would happily start again if someone had a great idea!
11 comments:
Love it ! but you should visit us in France to add 'champagne cap' to your collection !
xx
François
That sounds like a great idea! I trust that will be an amazing vacation :)
Love the label board, genius!
Does the white glue work well for the beer labels? I'm making one for wine labels and want to make sure I use the right adhesive.
The glue you'll need to use may depend on what you're sticking the labels but here's what we did..
The labels you see in our pictures are glued to a plain white canvas. Regular Elmer's white glue worked perfectly and the labels are stuck on there forever. You'll need to be careful not to use too much on the thinner labels as they'll start to buckle or ripple because of too much moisture.
You really don't need too much glue and when the labels start to overlap each other because then you're gluing paper to paper.
At our local On The Border restaurant there is a huge piece for art work which resembles this. It uses Corona bottle caps to make a huge bottle shape within a frame. I saw it and the first thing I thought of... THEY STOLE Second Snacks IDEA! lol
How did you glue the push pins to the back of the bottle caps? And what kind of push pins did you use (plastic or metal?)
Anonymous,
We used plastic push-pins. The brightly colored ones you find in any school or office. Unfortunately the name/brand of glue that we used escapes me but the key was finding one that would bind different types of material together. The caps are metal and the push pin heads are plastic. So all you need to do is find a craft glue that will bind them both together.
we set out a bunch of caps and put a decent sized drop of glue on each one and then rested the pin into the glob of glue. We let them dry for 24 hours and they were ready to go.
Even when they're dry, they're pretty fragile. The glue can shatter so be careful when pushing the caps in. You are bound to break a few of the glue bindings but most will work. Out of that entire board, only about 8-10 shattered.
I glued some bottle caps onto a mirror frame...I love it!
You can use bottle caps beer lables and wine . Read to know how
I love it!! I have every bottle cap from High School - i must have 10,000. This is perfect! Have you seen this new bottle opener called the GrOpener. It keeps the bottle caps flat. pretty cool! www.gropener.com
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