Recycled Toy Capsule Wall Hanging

The living room, with new recycled capsule wall hanging. Who needs wallpaper?

One of the few down sides to our apartment is the regulation against hanging anything on the plaster walls. The superintendent warned us that our walls, painted a smooth, cool buttermilk, were not to be nailed into, painted, or altered in any way, under penalty of losing our deposit. Yikes.

One Saturday, B and I went to the always-wonderful East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse for some possible visual inspiration. Wandering amid aisles of castaway curiosities and recycled objects, we found three boxes filled with hundreds of discarded brightly-colored plastic toy capsules, the kind you’d see in 25-cent vending machines (UPDATE: thanks to the discussion on the BoingBoing post, I found out that these are actually what’s known as Gashapon capsules, made in Japan!), clear orbs with tiny trinkets inside.

They were too much fun to pass up. We bought the entire lot of them, and brought them home.

Each of the capsules had holes drilled through the top and bottom, like a giant bead. We hit on the idea of stringing them together as a wall hanging, using heavyweight fishing line and hanging them in rows from the top of the picture moulding in the living room. I ordered a economy-size box of picture hangers from a framing supply store, and the project was ready to go.

Detail of the capsules. They make a great rattling sound when they're all strung together.

Detail of the hangers and the capsules.

There were two challenges about this particular undertaking: wielding a giant strand of plastic spheres overhead while balancing on tip-toe on the back of the couch inches from the wall; and the fact that the weight of the capsules causes the fishing line to be stretched once they’re hung, thus creating a “rather unsightly” (ha!) gap between the hanger and the capsules. We solved the problem by winding the extra slack line on each strand around the picture hanger after the capsules were hung.

(UPDATE: By request, here’s a photo of the hangers and the fishing line. You can cut the fishing line closer to make it less obvious. Since we have high ceilings and the line is clear, it’s not so visually distracting — although it’d be interesting to try painting the hangers white or covering them in some way. Any ideas out there?)

I keep going back to the Depot to see if they’ve got any more extra toy capsules to cover the other part of the room, but I haven’t seen any yet.

I do, however, have a box of 500 extra brass picture moulding hangers, just in case.