Small Gifts: Coin Animals in Sea Shells

Several times per year I have to travel abroad for my work. Last weekend I was in Mozambique and there was not much to do at the place where I was staying. I missed home and I missed the possibility to make something, but I had plenty of time to think about my next project.

The idea is based on an oyster, with a pearl inside. It is something valuable together with an animal in a shell. Coins have a bit of value and some of them have nice images of animals. I wanted to combine that into a small gift that I could give to my family back home.

Materials:

• Sea shells
• Coins

Tools:

• Small vise
• Jewelers saw
• Hot glue
• File
• Tweezers (optional)

I knew that I had to change flights in South-Africa, so I looked on the internet to see which coins are used in Mozambique and South-Africa, bought something, asked if I could get some different coins as change and saved them for my project.

Back home I checked which coins I had from previous trips and decided to use three of them:

• A fish from Mozambique (sea)
• A deer from South-Africa (land)
• An eagle from the USA (air)

The sea is half an hour driving from where I live and we decided to go to the beach to collect some sea shells together. It was cold and windy and soon after we arrived it started to rain, but it was nice to be at the beach and we collected some shells.

I have a tiny red vise and I clamped it to a piece of wood in my regular vise. That way I got a way to hold the coin horizontal in place while I would cut it.

I used the jewelers saw to cut around the animal and it took about half an hour to cut the entire coin. The deer was the most difficult one, so I documented how I cut that coin. The fish and the eagle were cut in a similar way.

Some tips:

• Be patient, it will take some time to cut the entire animal.
• Use a saw blade suitable for metal, so with more teeth per inch than for wood.
• Hold the saw very loosely, so it does not get stuck.
• Be prepared that the blade can break. (I broke one blade.)
• Use a good light while cutting as the lines on the coin can be hard to see.

After cutting the coins, the animals have some sharp edges. I used a small file to remove the sharp edges. That went very quick and just took a few minutes for each animal.

Most of the shells on the beach are actually only half a shell. I looked at the shells that we found and tried to find some matching pairs. They were not exactly the same size but close enough for what I needed.

I used hot glue to glue the deer to the bottom half of the shell. I let the glue set for about 1 minute and then glued another half shell on top to get a complete shell.

For the fish I tried to add the glue to the shell first and then quickly to place the fish in the glue. That did not work so well as the glue dries too quick for that. So I added a bit more glue to make sure the fish would stay in place.

I now used some sand to keep the shells stable while gluing, but just keeping the shells in my hand like I did with the deer, worked better.

I glued the eagle to the top shell instead of the bottom shell. It does not make much difference but the glue is less visible if the animal is glued to the top shell.

The shells are ready!