Supplies used in this article:

• Bottle caps (unused)
  
• Rubber mallet
  
• Glossy Accents by Ranger
  
• Craft-t Metallic Rub-ons
  
• MM acrylic paint/paintbrush
  
• Stickers

Bottle caps can be used for a wide variety of embellishments for your scrapbook pages or other paper crafts.

The first thing is to decide if you want to flatten your bottle caps or use them as they are. If you choose to flatten them use a rubber mallet and hit it about twice on the outside (the top of the bottle cap) and flip over and hit it once on the inside to even it out. In the second photo the two on the top show the outside of the bottle cap and the two on the bottom show the inside of the bottle cap once it is flattened.

For one set of my flattened bottle caps I chose to use stickers by Design Originals that are made for bottle caps and placed them on the inside.

For the second set I painted the outside with yellow acrylic paint and then placed stickers in the center of the bottle caps.

Another variation for bottle caps is you can use them to "float" small embellishments using a clear glaze like Glossy Accents.

In the first example I applied one layer of the glaze to the inside of the bottle cap, and then I placed a small flower embellishment in the center and then filled the rest of the bottle cap with glaze. The flower is now sandwiched between the two layers of glaze.

To add color to my second example I applied a blue metallic rub-on to the inside of bottle cap before I added the first layer of glaze.

There are many other techniques you can use with bottle caps. You can punch holes and thread all kinds of fiber with them, you can heat emboss them, distress, etc.

Your bottle caps are now ready to use as is or you can add them to another embellishment to add a layer of texture such as a slide.

Please visit the gallery for many more example of how to use bottle caps in your projects.

See more of Chela's work in our gallery.