POULSBO — One third-grade class at Vinland Elementary School knows a little something about turning trash into treasure.

The class was given the idea by parent volunteer Richele Strong to upcycle bottle caps and turn them into a mural for the school’s annual auction.

Strong said she got the idea from her sister, who showed her smaller versions of bottle cap artwork.

“I thought, ‘Wow, it would be really neat to see a larger mural,'” Strong said. “So I started looking online, and noticed that there was nothing like this in the county.”

Strong works as an art docent for another class at Vinland Elementary and has a child in Rebecca Ryan’s third-grade class. So, when they were looking for something to do for the school auction, Strong suggested the bottle cap mural.

“The kids took that on from the beginning,” Strong said. “They got to create the idea, collect the caps themselves, sort them out and then actually paint the mural itself. Being able to see it from the beginning to the end and knowing that it was a complete process that they were a part of (is important).”

Ryan said students, parents and local businesses such as coffee shops all helped collect  bottle caps, and ultimately the class collected about 2,500 for the mural, which were then cleaned and sorted by colors. The students also came up with the design of the mural, a seascape featuring the school’s mascot, a dolphin, which they painted onto a large sheet of plywood before the caps were arranged and glued to it.

After the students finished gluing the caps on, Ryan said there was a parent work night, when parents screwed the caps in place to make sure they would last in all weather.

The centerpiece of the bottle-cap mural is a dolphin, the mascot of Vinland Elementary, leaping over waves in front of a setting sun. Photo by Michelle Beahm.

The biggest challenge, according to Ryan, was finding all the right colors. She said finding gray caps were harder than expected, but important for the dolphin.

The real point of the project was to turn trash into treasure.

“Surprisingly, they (bottle caps) cannot be recycled,” Ryan said. “One way or another, bottle caps make their way to a landfill. The idea was to use something that would normally end up trashed and make something beautiful out of it.”

Strong said, “If these are going to be thrown in the landfill anyway, we might as well think of a good use for them, and a little bit goes a long way, if you think about it.

“There’s a little over 2,000 (caps) on there right now, and most of that would just go straight into the trash,” Strong said.

She added that an important takeaway for the students is to “see that art is more than the typical type of process that you think of … it can be something like taking what could be considered trash and making it a treasure of their own.”

The completed mural, after the auction, was donated back to the school, and will eventually hang the wall outside of Ryan’s portable classroom.

“The kids will have a visible reminder of a way they were able to take something that was really garbage and make art from it,” Ryan said.