Upcycled bottle cap dog tags

remember these metal bottle caps (left over from our glass water bottles) and t-shirt sleeves (left over from various projects, such as my bathroom rug)? i also posted a photo of a bunch of cardboard boxes. this stuff was all for a children’s “green art” project that i participated in last week, during which the kids created…

…cardboard dogs! here are the ones my daughter and her cousin made.

they traced the dog shape onto the cardboard from a precut one or just freehanding it. (seeing as i was very busy the entire time, i didn’t manage to take a single picture at the event. these ones are from the facebook events’ pages. clicking on each one will bring you to the original posted photo.)

then they colored them, cut them out and decorated them with all sorts of recuperated materials (not necessarily in that order).

there were blankets on the ground for work stations with materials to work with. the kids had loads of fun and some really went all out with their dog decorations!

then the kids had their dogs run an obstacle course, after which real dogs arrived with their trainer and they also did the same course.

another view of the action. i’m the one just under the edge of the tent with the purple t-shirt and something around my neck which i’ll write about next time. now i want to show you how we transformed the sleeves into collars and caps into dog tags.

for the tags, get something pointy (here an ice pick), a hammer, a magazine or something else to put underneath and obviously a metal bottle cap.

make a nice little hole in the cap by hammering your preferred pointy object. a little bit of sharp metal can stick out the back, so i just used the tip of the ice pick to bend it back out of harm’s way.

use a permanent marker to write animal’s and/or owner’s names. or you can cover the cap with a sticker. (but it’s better if you stick it on before punching the hole.) (poor little smiley guy… it looks like someone shot him square in the head….)

as for the collar, just cut a strip off of a sleeve. using the hem works pretty well, but you can use the whole thing.

tie the tag onto the collar with a bit of thread or twine or whatever you choose.

and check out george and clifford sporting their new duds! it’s a fun, easy, recuperating-ish (yes, bad italian translation) activity. next time i’ll show you what i did with the leftover cut sleeve strips!