Celebrating a year of marriage is a miracle! Any amount of years after that deserves a medal, a reward, a trophy or even just a homemade gift!
My husband and I have been sticking to the classic anniversary gifts for the most part, because after the first few anniversaries, you kind of start to run out of ideas. This year is our 6th year wedding anniversary, so the customary gift is iron. I have got to say, iron is not the easiest gift to come by. Unless you get someone a cast iron pan, or a set of golf clubs, not much comes in iron.
(I suppose this wouldn't be a terrible iron gift, but we just don't have enough room in our house for it...not to mention it's a bit of a child hazard.)
So I decided to break away from tradition and make my own gift this year! I also didn't have a lot of money, so I made do with what I had!
So let's get to the good stuff!
First I took the huge pile of pennies I had piling up and I searched for the years I was looking for. Once I had grabbed 2013-2019, I put them in a salt/vinegar mixture to clean them.
(1 Teaspoon of salt mixed with 1/4 cup of vinegar, then just drop the pennies in.)
(Before)
(After)
Once that was done, I acquired all of my materials:
(A steel stamping set you can get at Harbor Freight for 10 bucks!)
First I lined up all of the stamps I would need. I wanted to stamp a heart on the 2013 penny (The year we were married) and then the subsequent years' pennies, I stamped a number on to demarcate the anniversary. (1 for 2014, 2 for 2015 and so on)
This was my somewhat ghetto setup for stamping the pennies. I took an old piece of wood and set it on my sawhorse. Then I gathered my stamps and hammer and was ready to go.
I decided on where I wanted the stamp number to go, and I hammered it in. I then proceeded to do this with all 7 pennies.
After the stamping is done, the drilling commences! Let me first say, this is MUCH easier to do with a dremmel drill, but for the sake of it being easy and something you can do with what you likely have on hand, a drill will also get the job done!
Once the holes are drilled, slip them on the key ring in the order of their dates and you are done! You now have an adorable, thoughtful, creative, homemade gift to give to your loved on for your anniversary! The best part is, you can add to this every year by just adding an extra penny! Cool right?
This took me about an hour, and it was rather labor intensive, but my hubs loved it, and I loved putting my own personal spin on it!
Give it a try and let me know how it goes!
Til next time!
xx - Lady Steem
