If you like the convenience of a Clipper Card but would rather have something more fashionable to whip out when paying for your fare, read on.

Twitter user @SailorHG shared the ingenious method of trial and error she went through in order to turn her Clipper Card into a quite fashionable looking ring. The Clipper Card is a one-card solution for a large majority of public transportation options in the San Francisco Bay Area but really only comes in one form, a plastic card. This lends itself to be lost in the shuffle with the rest of someone’s cards and as a form of transportation for a large majority of California residents, losing your card is not something you want to happen. Just like @SailorHG, there’s a growing amount of Clipper Card users in the DIY community that figured out how to turn their cards into wearables, which this is.

Check out her series of tweets resulting in a workable card below.

The largest hurdle anyone comes up against turning their Clipper Card into a wearable is extracting the Near Field Communication (NFC) device, which she refers to as an RFID tag. By soaking her card in acetone over a period of several days, she’s able to extract the chip and wire that stores information and powers the NFC communication between devices.

Initially, her first ring failed to work because allowing an NFC chip and wire to cure uncovered on resin damaged the NFC device rendering it unreadable. But, it looks like if you wrap the Clipper Card’s NFC device with a bit of tape, it’s able to cure on resin just fine.

Her project even caught the eye of BART who retweeted her project with a clarification that although they think her idea is pretty neat, they don’t really want people altering Clipper Cards in the first place. But, if you can get it to work like she did, no harm no foul.

I really like the final outcome, especially how it works exactly the same as a regular Clipper Card now. I imagine if rings aren’t your thing, the same principle can be applied to bracelets, necklaces, and other wearables.

Researching about how Clipper Cards work I came across how in Berlin some shoes even had NFC chips embedded in that that allowed wearers to board trains just by walking across NFC readers. How cool is that?

Theoretically, you could embed a Clipper Card NFC chip into any shoe, just like this craft project above, but you’d probably have to either kick the active NFC device without damaging it every time to pay or take your shoe off to make it feasible. I’m just spitballing here.

What are your thoughts on making wearables out of NFC cards? What would you turn your Clipper Card into? Let me know in the comments below.

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