Shrinky Dinks Arts & Crafts

I remember Shrinky Dinks from when I was a child. It's the plastic where you color your own design, cut it out and then bake it in the oven so that it shrinks down and becomes thicker. Instead of a large and flexible piece of plastic, you wind up with a sturdy little charm or figure or whatever it was you made.

I'm about to attend an event where I'm going to teach a few classes, and I was asked to bring along some sort of token to hand out to the people who come to my sessions. Many other teachers mentioned using buttons or other little thing that could be pinned to a shirt or sash, but as I was searching online and looking at prices for buttons, it dawned on me that I could make my own charm-style tokens and I could customize the designs for a fraction of the cost of trying to find something suitable that was ready-made.

Where the heck was this stuff when I was in high school? Too cool!

Instead of having to color the entire background dark, there now exists opaque brown and black Shrinky Dink plastic. Some very cool effects can be done with this. In the Midnight Jewelry kit, pre-printed designs allow you to make various charms. The designs are black and white, leaving you the option of coloring them in with whatever colors you want.

One very interesting option with these sheets is to use rubber stamps to make designs. If you get ink that dries to become permanent, any rubber stamp can be used to create your artwork. 

Sadly Amazon doesn't sell this stuff, but sometimes you do find it on eBay.

Okay, now this most certainly did not exist when I was a child, and it was a huge factor in me deciding to get Shrinky Dinks to make my custom tokens to hand out to my students. No tracing, no coloring-in by hand involved here. This special printing paper works with inkjet printers, so all you have to do is create your image using your favorite graphic software, and then print it out onto the plastic sheets.

It is recommended that you lighten any images by about 50%. The reason for this is so that when the plastic shrinks in the oven, the ink isn't so concentrated that it messes up the process. But now you can take any line drawing or even a photograph and use it for making your Shrinky Dinks.

A note for those with laser printers: you can't use Shrinky Dinks with this type of printer as the printing process is too hot and starts to melt the plastic while in the printer.

So, here's one of the little tokens I made to give my students. I found a nice graphic, and then duplicated it all over a single page in my word processor program, which also allowed me to lighten the image. The starting size was 2.5" circles. The Shrinky Dinks paper is only about 8"x10", not 8.5"x11" so instead of 12 to a page, I reworked my layout to be 9 to a page. Remember to leave some margin around the edges as most home printers won't print right to the edge and you don't want parts of the design cut off.

After printing the sheet, I cut out each circular emblem with scissors. Then using a regular, handheld paper punch, I punched a hole near the top of each design. On the backs of the circles, I wrote down the class name and date using a fine point Sharpie pen. Then I pre-heated my oven, cut out some brown paper bag to line a baking sheet, and when the oven was ready, I put in my tokens.

They shrank and baked down in about 4 minutes. I didn't have any problems like shapes curling up and getting stuck to themselves, but the included instructions have tips for all sorts of potential issues. They only took a minute or two to cool down, and then I sprayed them with an acrylic spray to protect the printed side design.

I'll add a jump ring and then the students can string them on a chain or use safety pins to attach them to just about anything.