Picture Bottle-Cap Magnets

Making these bottle-cap magnets turned out to be one of the most fun and rewarding projects that my daughter and I have done together — right up there with our felt salad, toddler art napkins, and favorite book character magnets that we use every day!

The idea for making glittered bottle-cap magnets came from Anna Getty’s book, I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas: Gifts, Decorations, and Recipes that Use Less and Mean More. By adding our daughter’s photo to the magnets, we’ve made a great holiday present for family. (Boy did I blow the surprise by posting this!)

Note: this project involves several layers of paint and glue, so you’ll need to allow several days to complete in order for each layer to fully dry between steps.

We started by gathering twist-off bottle caps. Since we rarely drink anything but water, milk or coconut water it took us several months to gather this meager collection of seven twist-off bottle tops:

We painted the bottle caps with white, blue and silver paint and let them fully dry:

After selecting favorite photos of our daughter, we used Photoshop to make photos with a 1 inch diameter circle around her face:

We printed the photos and cut them out to fit in the bottle caps:

Then we mod podged the circular photos to the inside of bottle caps. After they dried, we sealed the photos by painting another layer of mod podge on top:

We put glue around the inside lip of the caps (just barely touching the photos inside) and sprinkled silver glitter over the top:

After the glue dried, we shook off the extra glitter and painted one final coat of mod podge to seal the glitter on:

We cut small magnets (from magnetic strips) and adhered them to the back of the bottle caps:

Ready to use! (Or send off to the relatives.)

I’m not gonna lie. We did save two for ourselves. They were entirely too cute to give away.

Now to save up bottle-caps so we can make some more…

Updated 1/13: Click here for more tips and helpful ideas in making these magnets!