Shrink plastic challenge

Happy hump day crafty people!  How’s your week going?  We are having some lovely sunny weather which always makes me feel good!  Today there is a new challenge launched on the Back to Basics and Beyond Blog and it’s a fun one!  The challenge is to use shrink plastic.  I must confess I don’t think I had ever used this, although I do remember making earrings with some crisp packets that I had shrunk in the oven (what a stylish kid I was!)  Did anyone else do this?  I seem to remember we bought Golden Wonder crips as they were supposed to be the best packets for it!

I bought a pack of Docrafts Shrink plastic from Craftstash and after playing about with it I decided to use this floral heart stamp which was another magazine freebie.

As I say I am not experienced with this but after some trial and error, I found a few helpful tips that I thought might be handy if you are a newbie too!

1. I used sandpaper to lightly sand the plastic sheet before stamping.  Without doing that I found the ink didn’t really stamp well and the colour didn’t last using pencils or alcohol pens.
2. I used StazOn ink and left it to dry for a really long time or it smudges!
3. When shrinking my designs the first few times I thought I was doing it wrong because the plastic balled up as it shrunk – but I learnt to keep going with the heat and it flattened out again like magic.
4. I pressed the new shrunk design with an acrylic stamp pad as soon as I switched off the heat gun and it helped to flatten it out.

The above version was coloured with some coloured pencils but I ended up using the one I coloured with alcohol pens.  As your design is shrunk the colours get more intense and I think the alcohol inks really looked glossy and rich.

I used the small flower stamp in the set to create a background and layered the card up with some dark green card stock and a sentiment cut from the same card with a little red heart inlaid.

I really liked playing with the shrink plastic and I’m going to have a go at making some charms using it.  Have you used this before and if so I’d love to hear what you made using it.  I hope you will pop over to the challenge blog and see what my fab design team chums have made, they are a talented bunch.  The challenge runs for two weeks so you have plenty of time to join in too, I hope you will share your fab ideas.  Thanks so much for visiting my blog.

Crafty hugs

Jenny (AKA the Ginger Ninja!) x