Introduction: Penny Jar

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About: Father of four boys and power sports salesman by day, maker of anything and everything by night! We love continuously making and learning new skills!

Looking for a neat way to get rid of all your obsolete pennies, and get a unique change jar or vase out of it.

Here's your answer, the penny jar!

Step 1: Materials You Will Need

For this project you will need a jar or vase, lots of pennies and of course a hot glue gun and glue.

Step 2: Starting Strip

First wash your vase with dish soap to get a nice clean surface to glue onto.

(Trust me if you skip this step and leave factory grease or oil on the container surface, you will be swearing at the jar because nothing will stick to it and you'll have to put money into it before you even start for all the cursing you've just done.)

Put your vase on a nice flat and level surface, and start your first row making sure the pennies are touching the counter top ensuring you will be level all the way around. All you need is a little dab of hot glue on each penny, you don't want to much or it'll be to much work to clean up afterwards.

This would be when you can decide a pattern, such as all facing heads, all facing tails, alternating, only shiny ones, only old coins etc... be creative!

I went with all facing tails and only Canadian coins as to get the maple leafs everywhere.

The second row you will need to make sure the coins are in between two from the previous row and touching them, then make your way all the way around and check to see if you're still level at the end.

If you get to the last one and it doesn't fit, I was over lapping it. You could also cut them with tin snips if you only need half a penny, but mine where fitting perfectly without having to cut them. (I got lucky with the vase!)

Step 3: Penny Up!

Once you're happy with the first two rows, and make sure you are because those two are the ground work for the whole container. If they are uneven or messing up the pattern fix it now or you will be again cursing the whole way up the jar because of all the extra work you now have to do to keep it looking pretty.

Now that your happy with your base layer continue the pattern all the way up with just a small dab of hot glue, clean up any glue strings as you move forward to the next row.

Once you get to the last row you will find out if your pennies fit perfectly, or if you will be cutting off the excess . Mine ended up half way up the pennies so instead of cutting the edge flush, I put glue on the lower half of the pennies and left them whole.

If you end up only seeing a bit of the glasses edge you could glue a nice ribbon as a border to hide the glass and change it up a bit from it being all copper.

That's it were done, Congratulations! You have yourself a brand new penny jar!