How a Workplan Helps With Bottle Cap Mosaic Assembly
Designing the mosaic is the easy half. The hard half is placing thousands of caps, by hand, in the right positions. The Workplan is what makes that half survivable.
The problem: thousands of tiny decisions
A modest 60 × 60 mosaic has 3,600 positions. Without a guide, each position is a decision: which design goes here, and does that choice break a later one? Improvising leads to the classic failure modes — running out of a design two-thirds through, discovering a wrong region only after the glue is out, and endless backtracking.
What the Workplan does
Generated by the Standalone Version, the Workplan translates the finished design into an assembly guide. For each position in the grid, it identifies which cap design belongs there, working from a plan that already respects your Cap Inventory quantities and each cap's rotation. You stop deciding and start placing.
How to work with it
- Prepare the board first. Mark or grid your backing so physical positions line up with plan positions before any caps come out.
- Work in sections. Finish one area fully rather than scattering caps across the whole grid; errors are cheaper to spot in a completed patch.
- Pull caps per section. Because your collection is sorted by design, you can fetch exactly the designs a section calls for.
- Count as you go. The plan's totals match your inventory — if a design runs short mid-build, something drifted earlier. Stop and reconcile.
Before you start
Confirm your grid math (how many caps you need), update your inventory counts, and make sure every design in the plan is physically in hand — or covered by Replica Cap Printing. Then follow the Workplan, cap by cap.