Did you know if you try to open a scanned image of a hundred dollar bill in Photoshop you will immediately get redirected to the Central Bank’s Counterfeit Deterrence Group? Despite making me feel a wee bit like Big Brother is watching, the website is a wealth (ha!) of information about how you can reproduce currency for artistic purposes; the good news— you can! But only if you follow the specific guidelines for each country. With US currency, it has to be either less than 75% or more than 150% of the size of the bill, you can only use one side, and you have to destroy the negative when you’re done. This all started the other night when my husband, our daughter, her boyfriend and I were chatting at dinner and I mentioned I had an idea to make $100 coasters. My daughter’s boyfriend said he heard that “something happened” if you tried to scan money so, of course, we tried it. And it scanned just fine. But Photoshop was not going to allow me to go any further until I followed the rules. Which is why Ben Franklin is pretty large on this set. I’m also thinking about making sets with a $100 bill on each but I’ll have to do the math to make sure that’s legit. Thinking about it, there are so many other options—it would be fun to print them on a fused rainbow coaster or to fuse little party hats onto our founding fathers’ heads. The options are endless!