They might be small beer to most of us but bottle tops could be the next big thing in fashion if one 17-year-old student from Norwich is anything to go by.

Florence Ventham, a pupil at Notre Dame High School, is fast turning her parents' far-flung collection of bottle tops into must have fashion items with Peroni. Kopparberg cider and Budweiser the current king of the tops to be turned into earrings and bracelets.

Miss Ventham, from Plumstead Road East, said the idea to turn something functional into a fashion item came to her relatively recently after she discovered the collection of bottle tops her parents had amassed from foreign holidays over the past 20 years.

She said: 'One day we were tidying up the garage and came across these bottle tops. I was watching this film, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, in which the girl made herself a Coca Cola bottle top necklace.'

Seeing the 2004 film, an American teen musical starring Lindsay Lohan, got her thinking about putting the tops she had recently discovered to a more useful purpose than gathering dust in the garage.

She said: 'I went upstairs and found some old earring backings I hadn't used to make the bottle tops into earrings.'

Miss Ventham made the earrings by using a hammer to hit a small screwdriver she got in a Christmas cracker and make a hole in the top which the backing is pulled through. She said: 'It takes about a minute to make a pair of earrings. It's nice and simple.'

Her school friends have been going crazy for them and now the enterprising teenager, who works at Pizza Hut on Riverside, has produced a number of samples to give Chris Higgins, landlord of the Trafford pub, to show his customers, some of whom have already noticed the jewellery that has been worn by a member of his bar staff.

She said: 'I started wearing them and sold them to my friend who is into different, interesting jewellery and she started showing some of my friends and word just spread. I have some Bacardi ones and a lot of Bud ones and I work in a restaurant so end up with a lot of Peroni ones and Kopparberg ones.'

Miss Ventham, who would like to one day be a professional dancer and who is currently a student at the Julie Glennie School of Dance in Lowestoft, said she enjoys making the earrings which she does with her mum Lesley, 54, who makes bracelets from the tops.

She said: 'It's something we can do together. I enjoy it.'