Buttons and bottle caps

Sorry it took a couple days. The buttons I used on the easy ruffle flower came to me very bright brass. I originally got them to use for crochet projects for my son who really really loves crocheted things and locally made art. Having a 19 yo son who likes it when I make things for him can be a little challenging at times.
I darkened the brass by holding them in pliers over a candle. If you move it around, you get a warmer, richer color. If you actually hold the buttons in the flame long enough to blacken, then wipe them off and hit it with a sealant you get that lovely patina that's on the button in the center of my flower.

There is a lot of glare in this picture, but the first button is unheated. The other 3 are heated to various degrees. The last one I sanded the hammer and sickle just a bit down to the base metal under the brass after darkening it which brought out the design a lot more clearly.
Now my daughter wants me to do it to enough of the bigger buttons to replace all the buttons on her overcoat which means I'll need to order more buttons! The buttons are from American Science and Surplus.
Bottle caps!
I posted a bottle cap necklace project at Beadwork at BellaOnline. No resin. I used Ranger's Glossy Accents which worked out very well.

The bottle cap on the Captain Jack necklace is from a bottle of Jack Black Blood Red Cola, which my daughter loves. Usually we make our own sodas from scratch, but occasionally we will buy non-corn syrup sodas. The Black Jack is a weird one, all the ones I've found online are corn syrup sweetened, but the one she drinks is cane sugar. They come in different bottles though, the long neck style bottles seem to have the corn syrup, the more old fashioned bottles that the Turnip's soda come in are cane sugar sweetened. All that to say (in a very long winded way) that the bottle cap has a skull and cross bones on it. Sometimes the cap just lends itself to what's going in it. When I showed it to my husband this morning, he was very sleepy. When he got home from work and took a look at it again he said "OH! Captain Jack SPARROW! I couldn't figure out why it looked nothing like John Barrowman!"
We have a couple local breweries, and one of them uses the Made In Alaska label on their bottle caps. I think I need to make some Alaskan themed necklaces.