Penny Table - First Project Using Epoxy

Did I mention that I'm a Pinterest Junkie? And through my scrolling I kept gravitating to pictures and projects that involved using epoxy. What was this wonder substance that I had never considered, much less used? I kept pinning Pinterest pictures that featured epoxy, and I was also intrigued with using pennies in a large scale way. I had just finished redoing my kitchen, and copper was one of the "looks" that I had focused on, and even built my kitchen around. I mean, I had a huge copper farmhouse sink installed. And used copper tiles copper paint in various places around the kitchen. Copper was my go-to metal of choice.

So when I saw a floor covered in pennies and sealed with epoxy I was completely drawn in, and wanted to give a try myself. I came upon an old round work table that was being thrown away by a local business, and I knew exactly what it needed to be transformed into - a penny table! Using epoxy at first was a bit daunting. The directions had warnings all over them, and the word DANGER was everywhere. So I made sure to do lots of reading about how to use it, and followed the directions to the letter. And while epoxy can certainly be finicky stuff that you definitely have to baby and be careful using, I love it. I once again saw so many potential future opportunities for creativity ahead. But first...the table!

Old Oak Work Table - BEFORE:

First I painted it, then played with designs using pennies. It took A LOT more pennies than I thought it would! How many do you think there are?

I very naively chose what turned out to be a somewhat difficult first epoxy project. The table I chose didn't have a lip, which meant no way to keep the epoxy from dripping right off the table top. And I wanted to have a layer of epoxy over the pennies. So I saw a YouTube post about this same predicament and they used foil and tape to build a wall to help keep the epoxy in. If I had to do this over again, I would totally do the process differently, but in the end I made it work. It was just quite a bit extra work for me this way.