Mosaic of Bottle Caps!

Artists Eurhi Jones and Betsy Teutsch play with mosaic tiles,
formerly known as threaded bottle caps. Photo: George M. Stern

Where do ideas come from? It is often hard to pinpoint the moment where an innovation comes from, but of course it requires experience and information.

To my knowledge, no one has done a mosaic mural using inset bottle caps like tiles/pavers. I have seen many bottle cap designs on Pinterest, some enormous, others small. 

In 2013, I participated in a week's long mosaic mural trip to Costa Rica with master mosaicist Laurel True. Using tile, mosaicists cut the ceramic tile with nippers, very hard on the hands. The effect is very visually attractive, though.

Since our FoodMoxie keyhole garden project will be constructed out of bottle bricks, suddenly I just started seeing bottle caps as mosaic pieces. When? I don't remember, the image was just there, fully formed of earlier exposures to mosaics, bottles, and keyhole gardens.

Why not create a colorful plastic bottle mosaic on the exterior of the retaining walls? I knew about keyhole gardens, featured first on my blog and then in my book, back when I went to Costa Rica. I suggested to the participants it would be a wonderful art commission, building one for a family garden and then designing a mosaic exterior--obviously the patron would need serious money for such a creation.

A square foot of solid bottle caps,
approximately 70.

Our approach will be collecting threaded plastic bottle caps with no logos, writing, or embossing, and creating a lively colorful design, engaging the community. If the result is beautiful, as we suspect it will be, we will have created an affordable way for low resource communities to create vibrant community art, upcycling waste materials. Such areas almost never have good waste management in place, but they have heaps of plastic everywhere.

A quick calculation means that in addition to the 1000 bottle bricks, we'll need about 5000 solid bottle caps. These are the ones found on jugs of milk, ice tea, juice, etc. Smaller caps from seltzer will be great for creating defining lines.

My favorites? Ensure nutritional supplement tops, which have a reflective cap inset, adding reflective light to our future design.

Start saving caps! We will be setting up a collection system soon.