You were aware of your drinking habits years ago and until recently, you did not know how to express them to others. Especially folks you just met who have no idea your idea of a fun time is, well...gee, I can't remember. I know it had something to do with something.

Time to actually do something with those bottle caps you were collecting for three years. Stop chucking them at one another in an attempt to see who can fit the most in the bowling ball girl-boobs.

Ideas we will most likely be putting to use next semester:

1) Making a doormat. Arrange the caps in whatever design you want and decide if you want to put them into the ground, embed into a carpet-like material, or make a resin mold. If you really want to make it interesting, use a few bottles in the design as well.

2) Make a beer cap curtain. You know those cheesy, beaded curtains every Hollywood fortune teller has? Yeah, make one out of beer caps and cord. All you have to do is drill two tiny holes in each cap and string it through. Or be lazy and duct tape them on, I will never know.

3) Make a poster. Arrange your bottle caps in a design, get some resin, smooth out the surface and put a picture hanger on it. Done.

4) Play checkers. Paint half black, half red. Voila! You have a checkers set now.

5) Switch out your bass guitar tuning pegs. Take two of your caps, superglue them together, covering the peg. Works best with a bass, but a regular guitar might work if you're careful.

6) Play cards with them. Note: This works with Pabst Blue Ribbon only. Collect the whole set!


This will probably have secondary posts in the upcoming semester, so cheers to the beginning! Stay sharp y'all.

Well after three days of nine-hour volunteering, I will take the time to put together some up-to-date information on how the reusing experiment is going. I wanted to make blocks of bottles in order to easily lay them together, assemble, and store. Since I am a college student and I do not have the foresight to know how duct tape will work, I automatically assume it will hold together anything I use it on, so why stop myself now?

No, we aren't talking about this plastic ship, that is waaaayyyy too complex. Nope, the idea here is to make a raft, or possibly a couch, out of old plastic bottles and containers with nothing more than duct tape, maybe some wire, and rubber cement. This is a bit of a long-term project, so for now I'll just show you how I began the project.

First, you have to get a boatload of bottles. This can probably be done in a day if you walk around town. Or, if you are like my family, you consume so many bottles you have a separate trash collection can called "recyclables," but is in fact simply used to store post-consumption waste. Clean them out and get ready to seal them off. If you don't feel like cleaning, you can still make a raft...a raft of uncleanliness!

I use rubber cement on the bottle threads and then twist it shut. Rubber cement has got to be the best glue for most of CDT's projects. I use it for all purposes, not just projects. Pens are so hard to hold onto, so just apply a little to your digits and profit!  That bowl of Cheetos just will not stay on your belly? Apply a little to your pectorals and profit! Hungry, and there is just nothing that can satisfy your desire for an amorphous, flammable liquid? Stop. Do not taste it, not without a little salt first.

Sometimes you will not have the caps, because let's face it: remembering is hard. If it was easy, I'd remember some allusion to something historical and make it sound witty in this sentence. Therefore, I found the best way of sealing off topless bottles is to get some duct tape, tear off a strip, and then seal up with hot glue. Seal the glue all around the bottle top's edge making sure it is waterproof. Or not, and let your raft sink, it's not like I care.

One attempt today is to figure out how to seal together several bottles to make pieces I will use to assemble the raft. I need to make larger pieces of similar sizes to get some consistency in the assembly, otherwise it just takes too much time taping each piece together individually. Let's see how it goes. Cheers, and good luck.