Shrink Plastic Experiment 1

Over the past few weeks I have learnt of a material that I never knew existed which is shrink plastic. I was pretty amazed to learn of what it does and all the different things you can make from it. In case you haven't heard of shrink plastic, its basically a plastic sheet which you can draw a design on, you then cut this design out and bake it in the oven. The heat of the oven makes your design shrink down to 7 times its size and become 7 times thicker, so you end up with a sort of plastic charm which you can use to make badges, necklaces, bracelets, etc.

For some time now I have been wanting to kind of expand the range of products I offer in my shop but without breaking the bank, so I've been very excited to try out this new found material. So this blog post is about my first official experiment with the medium, told with photos (lucky you)!
Note: I should warn any readers now that this experiment does not end well. It goes really well right up to the very end and then I tripped up on something. But you live, you learn, right?

First I sketched out the designs I wanted to make. The idea was to make the designs into pin badges. The designs need to be 7 times bigger then you intend as they will shrink down a lot in the oven.

I then placed some shrink plastic over the sketches (I obtained this from ebay and the brand was called 'shrinkies') and traced over them using a permanent marker.

I cut out my designs, ready to go into the oven.

After being placed in the oven for just a couple of minutes, they shrunk down and became these little fellas.
I placed 3-4 of the cut outs at a time on to a foil-lined baking tray and put in a 170°C oven for just a couple of minutes. They will contorted and shrunk down. Once the charms stopped shrinking and were lying reasonably flat, I took them out of the oven and placed a heavy book on to them to make sure they would be as flat as they could be!

And here are the finished charms compared to the original sketch - just to show how much they shrink down!

I used acrylic paints to colour the backs of each charm. You need to layer the paint so as the colours you want at the front of the charm are painted on first (if that makes sense).

After painting all the charms I coated them in one colour of paint just so the backs looked a bit more uniform. You may notice I used my nafftastic colours here - which I was pretty chuffed with.

I then coated the front and backs of the charms with a sealant (I used Mod Podge) just to give the charm some protection.

So I could have stopped here, the charms looked good and finished; but I had the bright idea of using embossing powder on the charms just to give them a more shiny and professional kind of glean. This is what happened...

Oh dear. I covered all of the charms with the embossing powder and put them in the oven at 170°C again. So I think what went wrong was that the oven was too hot and I didn't spread the embossing powder enough around each charm which resulted in this crafty gloopy catastrophe. What a shame.

So there we go, there was my first experiment with shrink plastic (and embossing powder)! I'm taking a little break from these charms for now, just to give myself time to recover from the first failure. But I'm hoping to try again and have some little pin badges up in my shop for Christmas. I will be extra careful with that tricky embossing powder in the future!