Make Your Own Shrinky-Dinks!

The kids and I wanted to do something special for the youth group to commemorate their upcoming mission trip to Joplin, Mo so when I came across this idea I thought this would just be too cool! AND I was right, it is!!

Here is how you too can make your own jewelery with homemade Shrinky DInks! Yes I do realize that a lot of people have no clue what a Shrinky Dink is but all I can tell you is they are cool toys from my childhood! They are still available but why buy what you can make? Here is a picture of some I had as a kid:

Basically they are sheets of plastic that you color and shrink in the oven to make little charms, etc.

So to get started you need this:

1 cookie sheet

Parchment Paper

Scissors

A hole punch

Permanent Markers

#6 Plastic Lids from foil containers, any container as long as its #6 plastic!

You can find out what # your plastic is by looking for this symbol with a # in it. Most take out containers are made of #6 plastic too.

Once you have everything together, go ahead and set your oven to 350 and move a rack to the lowest setting in the oven. This way by the time you get ready to bake them, your oven is good and warmed up!

Take your plastic container lid and cut the flat part out like so:

At this point you just go crazy! Scribble all over the plastic or cut it into whatever shape you want! We did 2 inch by 2 inch squares for the pendants we wanted to make! We then used the permanent markers to put our design onto the pieces.

Using the single-hole punch, punch a hole in the plastic so you have somewhere to hang your earring parts or the string to make a necklace. You have to so this now because if not you will have to use a tiny drill bit to get through the shrunken plastic. You need to round the edges with some scissors as well because again, you can't do it after they bake and the edges will be sharp if you don't!

Here is a shot of some small round ones we made too!

Line your cookie sheet with some parchment paper. Place your cut outs on the paper and then in your 350 degree preheated oven.

This what ours looked like before we baked.

While these are in the oven, they will curl up really badly. You will think they are ruined but they aren't! Be patient, they will start to shrink and flatten. When they are flattened out they are done shrinking! It can take anywhere from about 30 seconds to 2 minutes for this to happen.

Here is before and after:

We even made some earrings with the left over wavy bits! The waves make cool lines if you don't color in between the waves!