We first learned about geocaching back when it was just getting started."What the heck are signature items?" We lurked for a while, as there were no such things as caches in our area. When we did start caching, we found a few, taking notice of what was in the caches, and began to collect items to place in our own first hide. We found a few more, and finally placed our own cache.

Our first two visitors left what they called their signature items. I remember asking my husband, "What the heck are signature items?" So, I got on my computer and searched the Groundspeak forums. I got more hits then I had time to go through in a couple of days. After learning more, my husband and I started to think that we wanted a signature item that we could place in caches along with our other trinkets. I noticed in my research that such items can be very collectable, and that people will watch a cache and rush out to find it because someone has placed either a TB or a signature item in it.

Our avatar (which can be just as much trouble to come up with and is just as personalized as a signature item) is a dragon; we wanted our signature item to match our avatar. We looked into using wooden nickels, tokens, and even thought of making our own. In doing research, I came across all sorts of signature items. There are geocoins, wooden nickels, painted rocks, and business cards. I have talked to many who use magnets and rubber stamps, while others have made their items by hand out of modeling clay, or have even let their kids help design the items. After all, geocaching is, and should be, a family sport.

I have heard of personalized music CDs, CDs and magnets that include photographs taken by cachers, and handmade coins. We have two cachers in our area that are avid fly fisherman and they both have left hand tied lures in caches. Other cachers leave old roman coins or gemstones behind as their signature item. We once went on vacation and found a bag of marbles, full of cat's eyes, that someone had used to personalize their visit to a cache. Most signature items depend on prices and what you can afford, which is why there are a lot of cool handmade creative signature items out there.

We finally thought we had the perfect signature item, only to find out it had been done before. However, we liked the idea so much we figured we just had to have some ourselves. What classifies the perfect signature item, you ask? Well, we started off by asking ourselves the following questions:

...we bought the equipment to make our own signature item. What? We needed a signature item to leave in caches. Where? Where would we get them? How? How many did we want, and how much did we want to spend on them? When? How soon did we want them?

Finding a manufacturer to create our sig items was the hard part; it took us two months to find a place, only to run into the problem of placing a minimum order, a requirement of many establishments. How did we get around that? Well, we bought the equipment to make our own signature item.

So, by now, you may be asking what we finally chose to use as our personalized signature. We decided to use elongated custom coins. My husband and I now have our perfect signature items; items that we're proud to place in every cache we find. We have quarters and brass quarters, nickels and brass nickels, and post and pre-1982 pennies. What's the difference, you ask? With the brass, you get a gold color. The post-1982 pennies, which have higher zinc content, tend to streak, but it does look neat with a cool design. With the pre-1982, you don't get the streaking. We have talked about leaving the gold in caches that we are the first to find, the silver in our second to find, and pennies in the rest.

We sent out several free samples of what we offer to the geocaching clubs for each state and to geocaching events. We've received glowing compliments from several cachers who have said they are really neat and they now have a reason to go find all those microcaches in their areas. Where, you may ask, can we we get them? We welcome interested cachers to visit our web site, www.smashingpennies.com, and check out some of our work. For a small fee, perhaps we can help you find your perfect signature item. And that, folks, is how the penny is squished.