My Shrinking Experiment with #6 Plastic

Using some online tutorials, including the ones linked in the last two entries here at TRF, plus information from the Official Shrinky Dinks website, I made my own (almost) FREE SHRINKY DINKS!

To make the image above, I laid my templates and my finished SDs on a flatbed scanner. All distortion you see is the actual distortion of the finished pieces.

For this experiment, I used a couple of food containers that were destined for the recycling bin. One had cookies in it, the other had fresh herbs. The containers need to be recycling category six to work. I made templates in Photoshop CS2 to create some knitting markers, tags and buttons. I have been wanting to make markers to use when I knit hats, so that I can remember how many stitches I cast on at the beginning.

I used a set of Sharpie markers to trace and color my designs onto the plastic. I used a regular sized hole punch to make the holes. (You can see that I forgot to punch one of the small tags.)

The online tutorials said to use 350F in the oven, but 325F worked for me just fine. I lined my cookie sheet with parchment paper. Most of my pieces were done shrinking in about 2 minutes or so. By the time I left them in for the 30 seconds extra recommended on the official Shrinky Dinks instructions, it was very close to 3 minutes.

I opened the oven to peek and take some quick pics with my camera phone. (Don't tell my service provider on me!)

Most of my plastic had ridges for stability, but all of the pieces baked to a nice smooth flat surface. The one small blue tag with the funny bump on the side was me trying to eek out another tag from a piece that was too small. I continued the design up the side of the plastic tray.

I tried sealing the color with clear nail polish, but it smudged my design. I will try something else and report back.

In conclusion, this experiment was a lot of fun. I would totally do it again.