Shrink Plastic. I'm serious.

Hello!

Did you ever use shrinky plastic back in the 90's? I did once with my kids. We bought pre-printed sheets of Christmas soldiers, cut them out, shrank them down, and used them as little bitty ornaments. I never thought a thing of it again until . . . Mollie Makes.

Oh, that magazine gets me. This issue was the culprit. Issue twenty-one.

Inside were lists of cute presents to make.  They called them "Pressie" ideas.  Illustrator Kayleigh O'Mara shared a cute hand drawn typewriter that she'd made into a brooch using shrink plastic.  I love old typewriters and have an old Corona in my craft space.  It reminds me to make sure I'm writing a good story (that life story, you know) every day.  Anyway, shrink plastic?  What?! I was intrigued and decided to try it myself so I ordered Shrink Film from Grafix. They say on their site "The creative uses are endless." and I think they might be right.   

I decided to start with a simple image.  One of the simplest I can think of is Hello Kitty so I traced her onto the sheet, colored her in, cut her out, and shrank her down.  I was pretty skeptical but it was a piece of cake! Even her whiskers turned out.  The most problem I had was with my messy color.

This next picture shows how big she was when she started.  It IS shrink plastic, after all.  You have to start much bigger than your final product will be because it will shrink more than 50%. 

If I could handle Hello Kitty, I thought I might be able to then manage Kayleigh's typewriter.
I copied and enlarged the image from the magazine and made enough to fit several onto one page.

Next I traced the images onto the shrink plastic with a Sharpie.  I love Sharpies. The plastic is interesting because it sounds like thin metal and cuts a little bit like tin, but you can see through it well enough to trace onto. Then I used Sharpies again to color them in. Fun!

You can see the shimmer of the plastic at the top of the sheet in this picture. The next step was to cut them out.

The shrink plastic should not be put into the oven on a metal sheet or a baking stone.  If you use either of those you are supposed to cover them with parchment paper or vellum.  I had neither so I opted for waxed paper which might have been a poor choice. I'll know for sure the next time around when I use something different.  You also put a top layer over them because they will curl as they shrink but the top piece will keep them from curling onto themselves.  If that happened you'd lose your piece.

You can, apparently, put these into a toaster oven or use an embossing tool to shrink them down but I chose the oven.  The instructions said to preheat the oven to between 300 and 350 so I went exactly between that to 325. In no time at all--seriously, I didn't time these--they were reduced to this.

HaHAAA!  I get such a kick out of that.  Big/Little  Before/After.  In this picture you can see the residue from the waxed paper and I think the wax from the top sheet might have made the color smear on the green one. :(  It also smeared the red one so as an experiment I used acetone to see how much of the total color would come off.  Surprisingly, quite a lot of the color remained permanently shrunk into the plastic.  Mine are not perfect or as tidy as I'd like them to be and like the Tinted Mason Jars, I totally need to do these over and I plan to but can't right now. 

So, great, but what in the world would you do with shrunken shrinky plastic pieces?  Mollie Makes turned them into brooches.  That's one option.  I gave Hello Kitty away to one of my favorite six-year-old Hello Kitty fans, and I turned the three remaining typewriters into bookmarks.  Why not?  I just glued a strip of grosgrain ribbon to each of them and called it good.  Super fun!

Have you used Shrink Plastic recently?  Honestly, I would love to know what you did.  Share your link with me here so I can go take a look! Thanks for stopping by!