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Did you know that a quarter fits in a standard pill bottle? You do now!
And if you are lucky, your standard pill bottle has a little tab on one side that you can thread a lanyard through to loop onto the handle of your Aldi shopping bag. And as long as you stock it once with quarters and always put them back you are set for shopping.
You could stop there and have a perfectly functioning quarter keeper.
Or you can make a shopping cart vinyl sticker for it, and make a slot in the top for putting the quarter back in.
Let’s go for option B:
To make the sticker, I searched the free online vector artwork sites for a simple shopping cart icon. I downloaded the file of my choice and used Adobe Illustrator to export it as a DXF file because the basic version of Silhouette Studio doesn’t support EPS files. Using these free files means this quarter keeper is for personal use only. The artwork doesn’t carry a commercial license.
In Silhouette Studio
In Silhouette Studio I like to set up the design page settings first to the correct size so I don’t accidentally cut outside the material when I send the project to cut.
I have a full sheet of vinyl so I’m setting that up as 12 x 12 with no mat.
I used the standard cut settings for Silhouette Vinyl. I actually craft with Oracal 651 vinyl. When I was researching the Silhouette Cameo and looking for a good bundle to buy, many crafters say this vinyl is superior to the Silhouette brand. I can’t really comment on that since it’s the only brand I’ve used (I haven’t used up all my stock from my original purchase). But I do like it. If you feel strongly one way or another, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
I cut and weeded the shopping cart and placed it on my pill bottle.
Taking the quarter out of the bottle is easy, you just take off the cap. And technically, you can take the top off to put the quarter back in.
But that’s not fun.
What’s fun is using a center punch to punch small holes in the cap. Put the flat side of the cap down on an old phone book and very carefully, using a mallet, punch a line of holes through the cap. (Use safety equipment and good judgment here to prevent injury).
Go back and overlap more holes down that line until you have an opening the size of a quarter in the cap. I used a box knife to neaten up the opening a little. I was very, very careful with the box knife, because I really did not want to have to tell everyone in the emergency room that I cut my hand making a quarter keeper.
And now I always have a quarter for Aldi. I usually stock it with extra quarters for when I’m feeling like a random act of kindness.
