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!
- 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.
- I used StazOn ink and left it to dry for a really long time or it smudges!
- 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.
- 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
love that you used the shrink plastic as your focal point, great make
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thanks Meg 🙂
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This came out so great! I love it!!
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thanks so much Sherri x
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Great job on your card! I remember playing with the stuff when I was a kid, but no clue what we made with it.
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Oo, I bet something better than crisp packet ear rings!! 😉 x
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Shrinking then with a heat gun is a great idea! I’ve still been putting mine into warm ovens lol!😜 Thanks for the tips!
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Ah, it is really quick with the heat gun x
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I love how vibrant your colours look on your shrunk piece. That’s one of the things I like about using shrink plastic. Love Dawn x
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Thanks Dawn x
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Your card is so pretty and I like the idea of using sandpaper on the plastic. 🙂
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Thanks so much Lucille x
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It looks like stained glass … Super use of the shrink plastic
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It does! I’m sure I’m going to be making more projects with this shrink plastic, it’s lots of fun x
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VERY NICE!!!!!!!
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Thanks Kathy x
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What a gorgeous card, I love that colorful shrink plastic heart!
Tammy x
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thanks so much Tammy x
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