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Since co-curating a large-scale bottle-cap art exhibit in the 1990s I’ve been trying to find published instructions for how to make the little two-bowled figures that were once ubiquitous in thrift stores across the Midwest. It seemed there must be some kind of master blueprint somewhere to explain the existence of so many identical copies of these kitschy figures.
Patent drawings exist for one kind of figure, but those drawings don’t explain the mass production of these handicrafts, especially since the most common ones don’t follow the patented style..
I’m still searching for the master set of plans. However, I recently stumbled upon the closest thing I’ve found to that holy grail. In its summer 1959 issue, Pack-O-Fun (“The only scrap craft magazine”) published an idea for a bottle-cap man supplied by Mrs. V.C. Steck of Chicago, presumably a Cub Scout den mother. The instructions don’t add up to a classic figure — the body is a can rather than a block of wood and there is no head bowl. But the core idea of stringing bottle caps onto coat-hangar wire to create a bowl-holding figure is there.
Where Mrs. Steck came up with the idea is another question, however, and the genesis of the identical wood-and-metal figures remains a mystery. But Pack-O-Fun supplies a step in the right direction.
Dive deep into bottle-cap lore: Unsealed: The Art of the Bottle Cap