Sunday, February 10, 2013

About 13,000 bottle caps, 34.5 tubes of glue, 96 square feet, 5 days...

Before
After sketching out the picture a couple of my high school students and I painted the 96 square feet mural.  

 After
We began on a Monday and in exactly 5 afternoons my K-5 elementary students were able to complete this Monet inspired mural recycling about 13,000 bottle caps.  We finished on Friday at exactly 3:00. 


Here's a close up of the bee.  A clean looking yellow bottle cap is hard to come by.  Most of them are blue or green on the inside.  The tops of the caps have writing on them which make them look dirty.  My students decided that the top of a Dr. Pepper bottle cap looked better than the green-blue inside.  So we glued each of them top side up.  
I wanted to have a light blue sky with a white cloud, but we just didn't have enough white caps with blue insides.  So I had a settle with a white sky and blue cloud.  


We used blue bottle caps with white insides for the bubbles.  Marker caps were used for the fins of the fish and flowers for the lily pads.  


Mrs. Retcher's kindergarten worked on the butterfly and they were so proud of it!!







7 comments:

  1. This is so amazing. Thanks for showing the process. I'm going to post a link to this over on my bulletin board blog. jan

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  2. Fabulous! What did you use for the board, and what type of glue? (I've been saving lids,and it's a bit disturbing to see how many caps we've saved in a year! I do recycle the containers, but it's eye-opening to be aware of how much plastic we use.)

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    Replies
    1. Thanks! Check out my post in January "Gearing up for another mural". It gives all of the details. There is also another detailed post in May "We used around 13,000 bottle caps." that shows detailed steps on how we put it together. We saved for 18 weeks and I have thousands of caps left over. I plan to donate them to "Caps for Cancer". Good luck!

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