While I was picking up a few items at Home Depot, my favorite store, I walked past the center aisle promotions on the way to the cash register and noticed a few items. It was the summer display with grilling accessories, fans, ice chests, chiller fans, and bottle cap openers.
I noticed the animal head bottle cap openers and saw they had a bulldog and a bear. Next to the animal bottle cap openers, they had a plain jane bottle cap opener which included a steel pan to put bottle caps in after popping them open. As hard as it may seem, I have two friends that are HUGE Mississippi State Bulldogs fans and live in Baton Rouge, La (home of the LSU Tigers). Since they have an upcoming wedding and I always make a personalized gift for my close friends rather than a store bought gift off the registry, I would buy these bottle cap openers and create a mix of the two.
First, I took the steel pan and rigged up some twine in the back screw holes. I suspended the pan from a metal hanger in the garage so that I could paint a base color and cover all the surfaces.
After the paint dried, I had Home Depot create a sample of their interior semi-gloss paint using the maroon color swatch. I used the white base color and the tinted maroon sample paints to freehand the lettering and numbering. As you can tell, I added the Mississippi State University logo as well as their wedding date and my artist signature to the pan.While the paint dried on the pan, I stained a piece of scrap wood I had in the garage from another project. After the initial coat of stain, I added a second coat to ensure the piece was covered and it created a somewhat darker color. When the stain dried, I added the bulldog head to the wooden base and added screws for the pan to attach to the wood base. On the backside of the wood, I added two eye hooks for hanging the bottle cap holder on the wall.
After adding a personalized message to the back of the gift, I sealed the piece of wood with a 2 layers of clear coat sealer. Although the saying is personalized and spot on accurate for the couple we gave this to, my wife accidentally messed up the message while writing it, so we had to alter the message.
"Cheers to a long...." changed to "Cheers to a lager life together - pop a bottle when times get stout!"
My wife missed the "n" in long and then we both started trying to think of a way to save the message, otherwise I'd be sanding the message off and re-staining the wood before the next message was written. I'll say this, my Bachelor of Science in International Marketing from University of Louisiana at Lafayette sure did come in handy when the message/slogan needed to be fixed.
Needless to say that my friends enjoyed the gift far more than I could have imagined. We toasted the gift with a few lagers from the local brewery, Abita Brewing Company.