34 Pounds of Coins

While searching for old pennies to use in my copper penny mordant solution (another one of my works-in-progress, post coming soon!), I discovered my SO's massive coin hoard. Every day for two years, SO emptied his change into plastic tupperwares, filling up progressively larger containers. Then, dismayed by the ridiculous amount of money being held up as petty change, he stopped using cash, stored the filled buckets in a closet, and forgot about them until I asked for pennies.

Of course, I sorted through all of them for my pre-1982 copper pennies. Then, the obvious next step was to redeem the rest of these coins into, you know, some usable form of currency. I don't use enough vending machines and coin laundry to use up even just the quarters, to say nothing of the dimes, nickels, and pennies.

Problem: none of our local (i.e. within a few blocks of our apartment) bank branches have a coin counting machine, and I didn't want to haul a backbreakingly heavy sack of coins around town. The nearby Chase offered free coin wrappers as an alternative. Pros: can organize and then redeem coins into bills or checking account deposit. Cons: someone needs to manually sort, count, and roll the coins. Additional con: someone is horrible at estimating how many coins she has, and needed to make 4 trips to the bank to get enough coin wrappers.

Solution: SO and I decided that if I was willing to spend the time sorting and counting the coins, I deserved half the take. Of course, with that motivation, I immediately got to work....

Here is my workspace near the beginning of the project, with only a few finished rolls on the side. I've sorted about half of the first bucket at this point.

And this is about halfway through the project, with all of the coins sorted (but still only about 10% counted out and rolled up).

The finished result is at the top of the post. Ta-da! Now for some fun numbers.

Stash stats*

Total value (U.S. currency only): $448.39
Total weight: 34 pounds
Hours to organize: 7.5 hrs
(Implied hourly wage: $59.79/hr total, or just under $30/hr for me since I'm only keeping half)

Number of coins: 4,405

• 35 Dollars
• 1 Half-Dollar
• 1,041 Quarters
• 1,046 Dimes
• 638 Nickels
• 1,614 Pennies
• 30 Foreign coins

Number of full coin rolls: 93

• 26 Quarter Rolls ($10 = 40 coins per roll)
• 20 Dime Rolls ($5 = 50 coins per roll)
• 15 Nickel Rolls ($2 = 40 coins per roll)
• 32 Penny Rolls ($0.50 = 50 coins per roll)

*All stats exclude the pre-1982 copper pennies that I previously took out for craftsy uses.

Tulip Sun Dye

I started a sun dye jar on July 1 with a container of pink tulip petals that I gathered earlier this summer (don't worry, I didn't go pick my neighbors' flowers, I collected petals that had already fallen on the ground from a park with thousands of flowers so that I could get enough). They were in my freezer for about two months while I worked on other things, but now they've been soaking for 1 1/2 weeks in a solution of 1/2 cup rubbing alcohol and 8 cups water. The jar is on my sunniest windowsill (inside, because from my apartment on the 20th floor there isn't a balcony or safe way to hang these on the outside of the window). This is what the jar looked like earlier this afternoon:

After the picture above, I strained out the remaining mushy petal scraps and added the yarn to the jar. I'm testing two yarns: 100% cotton (Bernat Handicrafter Cotton) and 100% wool (Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool).

Here is the jar after the yarn was added:

And here is the soggy petal mess that came out of the jar (lovely, right? smelled great too...):

I'm going to let the sun dye jar + yarn sit in the sunny window until the end of August. I'll update then with pictures of the results!