Money Eyeglasses

Start by rolling up four of the bills into tight tubes (as explained here).

Then fold the remaining bill exactly in half lengthwise, twice.

Now you have the pieces.

"outside end"

"inside end"

The end of the rolled bill on the left side of the picture is the end where the wrap ends. For simplicity, I’ll refer to this below as the outside end. The end to the right will be called the inside end.

Two of the tubes will make the earpieces for the glasses. For each, take the outside end and bend about 1 and 3/4 inches in an arc as shown.

On the inside end of the earpiece tubes, flatten out about 5/8ths of an inch of the tube, and then sharply make a right angle with the flat portion. Make the two go in opposite directions. These tabs will be used to attach to the rims.

Each of the two remaining unused tubes will become a "rim". On each of these, pinch down about 1/2 of inch of the inside end.

Flattening the end, and then creasing the flat portion into a V shape works nicely. (The point is to make this end small enough to be inserted in the opposite end, as described in the next step.)

Okay, the top bill in this image shows the “half-top-to-bottom” fold.

Carefully start unwrapping the rim tubes. It helps to squash the circular shape to a very elliptical shape while doing this. Do not disturb the wrap any more than necessary to achieve this – you want this to be able to re-wrap tightly. Unwrap about two layers as shown at top.

Where you have unwrapped the rim tube, insert the tab on the inside end of one of the earpiece tabs. Not shown in this close-up, the earpiece outside end would be "down" in this orientation. (See next illustration.)

Re-wrap the end of the rim around tightly to capture the tab from the earpiece tube. Restoring the rim tube to a circular shape after re-wrapping will help prevent this from unwrapping again.

Repeat the step above for the other rim & earpiece, but sticking out the opposite side. You now have two complementary sides. The remaining bill will become the nose piece / bridge to hold the two sides together.

Start by looping about 3/4ths of an inch of the flat bill around one of the rims. Do this with the earpiece sticking towards you and the outside of the flat bill (white border) on the outside of this wrap.

Slip the other rim over the long end of the flat bill, making sure the earpiece is in the right orientation.

(I’ve skewed this slightly in the illustration for clarity. You really want this to wrap straight over top of the previous step.)

Fold the end of the flat bill so that it now forms a right angle to the previous wraps. The spacing between the rims should be just wide enough to allow for the flat bill to wrap in this orientation (see next step). If not, do not continue. Go back and adjust the initial folds of the flat bill so that this will be properly spaced.

Wrap the remainder of the bill around underneath. Make this tight. If you don’t get this part tight, the whole thing will fall apart about
thirty seconds after you’ve completed it.

Continue wrapping the remainder around tightly. If you have closely followed the previous steps, the remainder should end up on the same side of the rims as the earpieces. It is not terribly important, but having it end up on this side will hide the next little tuck…

Skew the end slightly to one side, and tuck what you can under the previous wrap as shown. If you have wrapped the "nosepiece" tightly enough, this will keep it all together.

Well, that’s about it. As you can see from this picture, which includes my real eyeglasses, this design is just about life-size.

Don’t be too surprised if your first attempt at this design doesn’t come out looking quite as neat as the illustrations. I’ve probably done hundreds of these over the years, and it takes a while to get used to getting them "just so".