If you're like me, there's a container in your house overflowing with bottle caps, corks and other beverage paraphernalia, gathering dust and taunting you from across the room with dozens of undone craft ideas swirling about.

With ideas for kids and grown-ups.

This is a guide to making a DIY bottle cap floor. Learn how to turn bottle caps into something new in this simple step-by-step Hometalk tutorial.

With ideas for kids and grown-ups.

Discover easy to follow, brilliant DIY bottle cap upcycling projects that will make your home look cozy and cute.

My holiday wrapping continues! This time I wanted to share with you my little tin gift card holders. Again, I purchased these plain metal containers at Creative Bag and I used the digital scrapbooking kit I purchased here to create the art to decorate them. I printed my designs as 4x6 photos at Costco but you could do this on your inkjet or laser printer. I've used patterned scrapbook papers to decorate these gift card holders as well. All you have to do is cut your paper into 3 3/8" x 2 1/4" rectangles and round the corners with a corner cropper. This same size will work for the outside and inside of the tin ... it's important to round the corners of the paper to fit the shape of the container. I prefer to use a gel medium to adhere the papers to the tin. Golden (medium matte) gel medium works great and there are lots of other brands of gel medium available at most arts & craft stores. Modge podge will also work or if you don't like to use "glue" you can use two sided tape. I decorated my tins with paper flowers, decorated bottle caps and of course, divine twine & buttons to match my other holiday wrapping projects. Here's a couple of quickie tutorials to show you how to make the paper flower and bottle cap embellishments: 1. gather your supplies: scrapbook paper, large circle punch (or you can cut a circle by hand), scissors, and a mini mister (or something to spray water) 2. punch a circle from the scrapbook paper - larger circles create larger flowers, smaller circles smaller flowers (the ones shown are 2 1/2" diameter). You will be cutting a spiral shape from the circle - if you do not want to do this by eye you can draw a shape similar to the one pictured to map out where to cut 3. cut your spiral out 4. I like to trim any edges that are not smooth as you can see in this photo 5. lightly mist your paper so that it is slightly moist - not wet - this will help you to manipulate the paper 6. from the centre of the paper, form a small cone shape and begin rolling the paper into the centre while the paper is still damp 7. continue to roll ... the tighter the roll the more layers you will make ... you can always go back and make it tighter if you feel the flower is too loose when you get to the end 8. you can also loosen the paper if it is too tight. Super easy right?! Let the paper dry before you use it as an embellishment in your projects. While it is drying ... go grab your paper punch and make some more! These are easy to make while the kids at swimming/skating/dance lessons. Want to know how I attached the paper flowers to my tin gift card holders? My secret is to use a big blob of Golden gel medium ... but this time I use the heavy gel (matte). You can most likely get away with using the medium weight too but I like to make sure that my projects look good and stay together long after I have given them away. 9. & 10. use a wooden stick to apply a large dab of gel medium 11. place your flower on top of the gel medium and press it down into shape ... you can relax the paper and let it open a bit if you want at this point. The gel medium will dry clear so don't worry if you see a little bit of it at the base of the flowers. 12. I think that a grouping of 3 or more of these flowers is sweet. You can add rhinestones, small buttons or glitter to the centres of the flowers if you want. I often add small scraps of green ribbon or paper for leaves. And now for the bottle caps ... 1. gather your supplies: paper (photo, scrapbooking paper, etc), 1" circle punch, bottle caps (recycle ones you have or use new ones without liners) and diamond glaze (I used Glossy Accents - available at most craft and scrapbooking stores). 2. first you have to cut a 1" circle from whatever paper you are using for the design in your bottle cap. I flip the punch over so I can see exactly what I am punching out. 3. pour a small dab of diamond glaze on the inside centre of your bottle cap to adhere the paper circle 4. press the paper down and leave it to dry for an hour ... you want the paper to be completely bonded to the bottle cap because if not, the paper will move during the next step and will not lay flat. 5. & 6. once you know that the paper will not move we will apply a thin coat of diamond glaze to the top of the design to seal it and give it a glossy finish. Tip: DO NOT SHAKE your bottle of diamond glaze ... it will give you bubbles and you do not want bubbles. If the bottle is plugged, use a pin to poke the top and allow the glaze to run freely. Start by adding a generous blob of diamond glaze in the middle and then gently move it around to cover the entire surface. It will dry clear. Allow your diamond glaze to dry for a few hours ... if you touch it too soon you will leave a finger mark. Once it is completely dry you can add a magnet to the back if you wish. I use E-6000 glue to attach the bottle caps to magnets, wood & metal. Warning: if you are using these bottle caps as embellishments on gift card holders, do not add a magnet to the bottle cap. Sounds like a cute idea but the magnet will deactivate any electronic gift cards that you put inside and you don't want that to happen. I glued my bottle caps to the tin containers. You can see more of my other wrapping projects over here ... 4 more sleeps till Christmas;)

I did a little junk jewelry workshop last Saturday. The biggest hit of the day was the bottle cap pendants/necklaces. Soooooo....I started looking around for more ideas....AND MORE bottle caps (I am bidding on some on ebay right now - wish me luck!) Look at this great frame! Great purse ~~ Christmas decor from jillruth ~~~ check out her blog! She made them into garlands... Some of the projects my "students" completed ~ prior to filling them with diamond glaze to set the paper/words/letter... These pictures are not the greatest...I have that new camera, but still trying to figure out all the fancy settings! Like I said, I am on the lookout for MORE bottle caps so that I can make some!!! ...hopefully, you'll be seeing my bottle cap creations at my next sale... don't forget about the giveaway!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today's works of art bring us forward again for some contemporary painting. The four works below are by a Chicago artist, Michael Naples, who painted Broken Beer Bottles in 2007. According to the biography, on his website, He "is an artist from Wheaton, IL. He earned his BFA degree from the American Academy of Art

DIY ideas with caps – an unusual material for homemade art decoration The thirst for creativity and the desire to do something beautiful and unusual pushes people to look for…

I have been collecting beer caps for a looong time. Being a total pack rat, I find myself collecting anything that is colorful, abundant, and has relative similarities between pieces. Beer caps are fantastic. During every party we've had over the last few years, I've put out the cap bowl, and attempted to collect every beer cap that popped in my house. Now, after a few beers, the attention to detail just isn't there to get a group of party people to drop their caps in a designated bowl, so I'd bet that I've only successfully collected about a fifth of the caps I should have. However, that only makes the caps that I DO have even more fun. As I sifted through them for this project, I noticed that I wasn't even sure what kind of beer some of them were. Then, there was the occasional Bud Light Lime cap which brought back memories of the only night we brought those home. Apparently, I threw in a couple of our Johnnie Walker caps in as we finished off a bottle of Black Label which I don't recall doing, but I'm glad that I did. Looking at those caps, I knew that this wind chime would serve as a personal "drunk history" of sorts - bringing up stories and reminding us of fun nights gone by. I started by sorting through the caps to make sure that I had a nice variety of brands. Then, I lined them up on the coffee table to see how they would look next to each other once they were attached. I ended up rearranging all of them based on color so that the yellow lemon beer caps, green lime caps, blue Sam Adams caps, and black Guinness caps were spread out to create a nice random feel and to avoid getting any spots that were too dark or too bright in one clump. Next, I grabbed my tools: - a scrap piece of 2x4 I had out in the shed - pliers - needle nose pliers - a wire cutter - my drill and 3/32 drill bit - 10mm safety wire - about 80 bottle caps - a handful of shiny plastic beads I've had FOREVER but wasn't quite sure what to do with To begin assembly, you'll want to make sure to grip your bottle caps with pliers while you drill. I started by just holding them down with my hands, but as we've all learned at one point or another, bottle caps can be deceivingly sharp. Also, you shouldn't put your fingers that close to a moving drill bit. Drill two holes into each cap. Attempt to put the holes directly across from each other so that the cap will hang straight once it's attached to the wire. *Drilling through metal is different than drilling through wood. It does not take even pressure and drill slowly through until you reach the other side. Just pick a spot, start drilling, and it will suddenly punch through the metal. I didn't bother paying attention to which direction the holes would cause the caps to hang because the color placement was more important to me, but if having all of your caps facing the correct way is important to you, then I would suggest marking all of your hole spots with a sharpie before drilling so that you don't drop the ball in the middle of the project. When you're looking at the back of something like 80 caps, it's easy to mix up the direction of the faces. The holes will be kind of jagged, so I recommend using gloves. I noticed the day after completing this project that my fingers had tiny scratches and tears on them which could have easily been avoided with gloves. I'm much more of a "hind sight is 20/20" kind of person when it comes to DIY projects. Once I get an idea, I tend to just jump on it without much prepping or safety consideration. However, I do NOT recommend doing your projects that way. Always consider safety first! Do as I say, not as I do, right? :) Once I had holes in all of the caps that I planned to use, I cut about 90 pieces of safety wire at about 4.5" long each. Then, I fed one end of a piece of wire into one hole from the back of the cap. Take the wire and wrap it around itself until it creates a nice tight spiral. Then, use the needle nose pliers to grab that end of the wire and crimp in into the coil so it doesn't catch on anything. I then slid a bead onto the end of the wire, turned the whole thing around and attached the other side of the wire to another bottle cap the exact same way as this one. This means you are only using one wire in between each cap, and I only put a bead on every other wire or so. For my hanger, I got really lucky. We are in the process of renovating our kitchen, and I ended up with an extra metal pole from a cabinet. So, I grabbed that, ran a string through each hole in the pole, and then ran some wire through the entire pole to hang it! I absolutely adore this wind chime. Now, I will admit that it doesn't make the musical sound of a standard wind chime, but the caps do make a cute little metallic clink as they tap each other in the wind. I also love how bright and colorful it is, which is hard to come by in our yard since we don't have a lot of flowering plants back there. Overall, it's a super cheerful, easy project that takes a little bit of time to put together but is completely worth it. I love sitting in the sun and thinking about all of the good times those caps facilitated :)

Metal beer and soda caps have lots of uses in jewelry making, from little flux holders to the jewelry itself. Bottle cap beads show off the printed, often colorful art on the top of the caps. String a collection of them together, or use one as a centerpiece on a necklace or bracelet. To make these metal beads, ...