Vintage Designer Clothing For Sale

Currently have vintage designer clothing and accessories for sale.  These are very well maintained.  Our sister location Gilbert Consign and Redsign has many items for sale now.  These will be available for nationwide sale in the next week so get you favorites now.All dresses $10, Pants and Jackets $8 and Accessories $5.  See individual photos.  https://www.facebook.com/Gilbertsconsignandredesign

JenCin Antique's and Unique Gifts Upcycling is Fun Making Bottle Caps into Jewelry

August has been a very active month at JenCin Antiques. Our store on Etsy is now up and running and we have over 60 items listed. A really new item and one that consumed a great amount of time this month is our new bottle cap jewelry. It has been so much fun creating a cool piece of jewelry from up-cycled bottle caps.  I've experimented with lots of options from epoxy to resins, Different paints and creative paint mixes to make the most unique bottle caps that both inspire, make you smile or stand for a cause. Having a some graphic design background has really made creating new designs easy for me to do since I have the cool program. I have also created my own templates and can do hundreds of custom designs including pictures, silhouettes, monograms, names, pet tags, or any digital file that can be reduced to a beautiful and readable one inch circle. I am also exploring adding silver and bronze pendants and chains over the next couple of months as well. The possibilities are really endless now that I have those creative juices going and am still finding it fun to do.

Just to give you a bit of the history on the new designs. I have taken real bottle caps, played with the

best way to splay the edges. Thank You, YouTube.com There are a number of videos on making bottle cap jewelry and different ways to make the bottle caps including buying them already done. Presently I'm making them from scratch. I like the idea of having really unique paint designs on the items. So my McGyver husband helped me with splaying the edges out. I had a few mishaps obviously. Of all things I ended up using a ball hitch. The heavy metal ball was just round enough to place on the inside of the bottle cap and hit with a hammer just so 2 or 3 times to get just the right angle. Then there is that pesky rubber seal. That is the most difficult to remove. I laid them out on the coffee burner (again thanks YouTube) Then realized that I also had a hot plate for my beeswax/soy projects. I heated them used a towel to hold them and then with pliers pulled the softened rubber seal out. Yes, if you are wondering I got a blister after doing about 100 of these. So now I thought I had bottle caps ready to paint, not so much, I had a trial and error period with bottle-caps and paint reacting and coming off. So I had to do the most unpleasant piece of this project and that is sanding the bottle-caps with some steel wool to help roughen up the surface to help the paint adhere better.

So if you want to skip this preparing step you can purchase bottle-caps already designed painted and ready to go or you can buy just plain bottle caps if you Google the results it's amazing what you can find. I am still on the path of doing it from scratch today but as time and interest in the bottle caps increases I may be forced to go commercial and buy them in bulk.

The next stage of the project was creating a design that fit into the one inch circle of the bottle cap. Hobby Lobby and Joann's have some great scrap-booking supplies for this part of the project as well as split rings, ball chain necklaces and epoxy dots and resin. Theses stores are great for purchasing items in small quantities so that you can experiment until you find the best solution for what you are trying to do. I bought a really small inexpensive circle die cutter for the circles and designed them in Adobe Photoshop. My favorite graphic design tool You can add a bleed and create layers just like scrap-booking only all digital. I love the layering feature of Adobe. The creativity of this project is endless.

I'm a pretty positive gal. I believe you have to create happiness from within and I love love love all the Facebook and Google inspirational sayings I see. They motivate me as well as remind me of all the good in the world. I get a lot of my inspiration from creative ideas I see there. So I won't claim I made up all these sayings but I will say that it's amazing what you can redesign to fit into a one inch circle that can inspire people and make them laugh. I also love the ability to create memories by adding a custom design of monograms, pet tags and pictures.

Here are some Tips from what I learned:

1. Some designs don't print well on an inkjet printer and look dull.
2. Some deigns look better printed commercially using Walmart, Snapfish or Shutterfly
3. Printing is trial and error print cheap black and white first test the cut then print in color.
4. Some deigns look better on card stock but must be sealed with a firm glue
5. If using epoxy dots its best to place them prior to gluing your project or you end up with a wet looking smear in the center
6. Some items look amazing in resign but be sure the picture is sealed
7. If using resin it's best to glue the design down prior to using the resin.
8. All Resins are not equal. Some are clear and some cause your ink to smear regardless of your sealing process.
9. Adding embellishments is a personal preference so make them to order.
10. Etsy is amazing and I'm really happy I decided to put all our wonderful items for sale there. 
11. Find a cause your believe in and make them into bottlecaps for fundraisers to help them make money. Its the right thing to do.