Thread: Penny flag...
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psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2016-07-18, 21:38

Tomorrow is my mom's birthday. I always make her something every year. After weeks of nothing hitting me, I'm lying in bed the other night and thought "I wonder what a flag made out of pennies would look like?" First thing I did was Google it, and saw where some folks have done just that, in various sizes. So that told me a) it could be done, and b) it actually looked kinda cool (almost like a sepia tone image, from a distance and squinting).

I knew I was wanting to keep it a reasonable, easily-displayed size, so I hopped up, came into the living room and launched Illustrator. I Googled the dimensions of a penny (.75") and began laying it out. Basically, 13 rows of 25 pennies in each results in a "flag" that is 9.75" tall and 18.75" wide. I had some 1x12 boards around (which are actually 11.25" wide, of course), so since that gave me a nice .75" border, top and bottom, I cut one to length at 20.25", giving me a .75" border on the sides as well.

Figuring it out in Illustrator:



Then it dawned on me..."am I going to have enough pennies - and of the right shades (dark, medium and shiny/new) - to do this? "So I raided my spare coin jar and that of my Dad's as well (325 pennies needed, at 25x13)...he had some good dark ones, so that was great. Poured out everything on the floor and kinda worked it out, dry, because I knew once I put them in place, they were going to be stuck for good. This pic is my first go at layout:



I tweaked a few things and eventually got something I liked. The darkest, oldest make up the blue canton field (I also knew, from putzing around in Illustrator, that if I painted the field behind the canton white, those would read as the stars. Yes, the number and placement isn't accurate, but I was constrained by the gaps in the pennies ). At first I thought doing all head, with Lincoln right-side-up and "even". After doing the dry mockup for 3-4 minutes, I was like "screw this...", so I just put them down however they went, totally random. But I did alternate heads/tails over the entire thing, starting with heads in the upper left corner and and alternating over all 25 pennies in a row, over 13 rows. It's heads and tails, both horizontally and vertically. A neat little detail that only I'll notice, probably.

The medium-toned pennies make up the red stripes, and any bright, shiny new ones represent the white. And away I went...



The blue tape is there to give me a highly visible edge line (vs. pencil line on black). Once I pressed a penny down, aligned on the blue tape, across the top and the left side, everything else just got butted up to it and went fairly quick/easy. The adhesive kicked in right away so nothing was moving around on me as I pressed the next course of pennies into place, so as long as you got that very top row and the left vertical column even against the tape, the remaining 280-something pennies just kinda locked into place, up against previous rows/columns.





It's a bit tedious...



But in the end, it turned out kinda cool/nice! (it helps if you squint a bit, or step back several feet)





A couple of shots this evening:





I'll give it to her tomorrow.






I never want to see another penny for the rest of my life...

PS - I'll probably never do this again (see previous sentence), but I now have three separate little jars for my daily/weekly penny/pocket change collecting: dark, medium and shiny/new. I figure if I can just organize/divide them all on the front end like this, if/when the time came and I wanted to make another, a huge chunk of the front-end monkey work would already be done! I just grab the dark jar and make my star field (10 wide x 7 tall), then pull from the medium and shiny jars when it's time to do the stripes.

PPS - I ran out of time so I'll give it to her as is, but one of my original ideas was to build a little frame around it, inset from the outside border of the black backing board, but about 1/8" or 1/4" from the edge of the flag. Glue/nail it down and then pour clear-drying epoxy into the center, burying/encasing the pennies under a thin hard layer of clear. That can be "part 2" of the gift, and something I can do this weekend, if she thinks that sounds good. But she may want to keep it just like this.

Last edited by psmith2.0 : 2016-07-18 at 22:09.
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