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Have you seen the Disney • Pixar movie Up? The Grape Soda pin that Ellie gives Carl at the beginning is loved by Disney fans around the world. I love a good DIY project so I decided to make my own Grape Soda pin from Up. You can purchase the pin at the Disney theme parks as well as the Disney stores in the mall.
Mine didn’t turn out perfect but I love it anyways. It is easy and inexpensive DIY project. The grape soda pins that Disney sells are an average of $12.99 so making your own is a great option. You’ll need a bottle cap, a nail, a hammer, silver spray paint, a grape soda label, scissors, glue, and a safety pin.
Once you have your supplies the best thing to do is place the safety pin on the back of the bottle cap. You want to give yourself an idea of where you place the holes so that the safety pin can go all the way through the cap. If you want you can take a sharpie and mark on the inside in case you forget where you need to place the nail. You want to place the safety pin high enough that the top of it will go over the cap. I placed the safety pin a bit lower than I would have liked but it still turned out okay.
Honestly, the placement of the holes for the safety pin can take some trial and error. This is by far the trickiest part of the project. I prefer to have the holes in place before I spray paint but you do not have to do everything in the same order as me. It took less than a minute to put two holes in the cap by using a hammer and a nail. Just be careful about what surface you use while you do this.
I used a coca cola bottle cap that didn’t have a crease in it, but it looks even more authentic if you use a cap that isn’t perfect. The pin in the movie had a crease in it. Diet coke bottle caps are a really great option because they are already silver. I decided not to use the diet coke bottle cap because I would have wanted to spray paint over the black lettering on the side. If you don’t want to have to spray paint the bottle caps you can find silver bottle caps here.
It took three coats of spray paint to completely cover up the red. I left the cap outside so that it could dry quickly.
While the bottle cap was drying I googled images of the grape soda pin. I took a screenshot of two different colors of the labels. I loaded into a Microsoft Word document where I fixed the size of the images to the size of a bottle cap. If you’re unsure what size to do just hold up a bottle cap to your computer screen and use that as a guide. I cut out both of the labels and put them on the bottle cap to see which one looked better. I ended up liking the darker one.
Once the bottle cap was dry I put the safety pin back in place and glued the label on. Next time I want to have the safety pin be higher up so that it looks better but I’m still pleased with how it turned out. The entire project took less than an hour and all that I had to buy was spray paint which made it really cheap.
A few weeks ago I got to meet Ed Asner who plays Mr. Fredrickson in Up. He is so precious! You can read about that experience here.
