Lacy Day 1: Shrinky Dinks

Today is the first day of a creativity challenge that my friend April and I have made for ourselves.  I am an expecting mom who is planning on staying home to care for our child (due any day now) and need something constructive to do to fill my days since I'm used to working full time and go a little stir crazy when left to my own devices.  I joked that instead of a 100 day creativity challenge, I should do a 100 day cleaning challenge instead, but maybe that'll be my next goal.

Today I chose to do a project making some necklace pendants out of #6 recyclable plastic, an idea I got from a tutorial on Pinterest (where else?)

I saved up a few deli containers from buying farewell cookies for my coworkers last week and could kick myself for tossing out the strawberry container I used this morning.  Sigh.  Alas, pregnancy brain.  I cruised through my jewelry pinboard to get some ideas of things I would find cute enough to wear and came up with a name pendant that I'll later layer with a footprint when the baby comes, a fishbowl, my state and a caged bird.

I sat down in Illustrator and sketched out my designs intending to print them to paper and trace on top of the transparent plastic, but I came up with a better idea.  I've previously had great luck feeding plastic through my trusty old Brother laserjet printer (the kind that you find in an office that uses toner, NOT ink) so I took my roughly 6" x 5" sheet of plastic I'd cut out of the top of my food container and put it in the manual feed tray and crowded my art onto the top left of my page.  Low and behold, it worked!  So, if you have a laserjet printer, give it a try, but don't forget to flop your image so that the "shiny" side of your pendant will face outward and be less likely to get scratched.  In Illustrator, choose Output in the print setting dialog and make sure to set the Emulsion setting to "Down (Right Reading)" or manually flop your art using the command Object > Reflect > Vertical before you print.  Many consumer printers also have a built in flop option in their print dialog for t-shirt transfers, so I'm sure this step won't pose too much difficulty if you're not using Illustrator.

Some notes on my vector drawing skills:  Don't be too impressed.  I already had the fish, bird, and state outlines from another project, and I downloaded them from the net and didn't draw them myself.  The heart, fishbowl, and cage were easy peasy using simple shapes and the pathfinder palette, the reflect tool to keep things symmetrical, and blended shapes.

I have found that the toner bakes into the finished product really well and will not scratch off, but the colors laid down with a Sharpie will scratch off easily, so if you're adding color, definitely lay a coat of varnish, clear nail polish, or mod podge on the back of your pendant to protect it against wear.

The next few steps were simple.  I cut out the pieces and colored in the areas that I wanted to have a little pop with colored Sharpies.  I used a 3/8th inch standard hole punch to make a hole at the top of each piece, and used the broad side of my scissors to scratch any of the outline of my cut marks off of the edges of the pieces so the black line would disappear.  I had read on another tutorial to expect a 2" object to shrink to .75", so I worked out the ratios and figured that if I wanted my pendants to be 1.5" long, then I would need to size the artwork to print at 3".  This ratio was spot on when baking at 250 degrees.  However, I can say from the experimentation that I did that if you turn the heat up to say 400 degrees, you will get a significantly smaller finished piece.

So, the pieces that I baked tonight did not turn out very well.  They stuck to the tin foil I used as a pan liner and all ended up with little dimples in the centers where they curled around themselves.  So I tried again and used a metal spatula to flatten out the pieces when they started to curl.  This was a bad idea as the print and shape warped massively when I pressed the pieces down.  So, don't do that.  Probably just use parchment paper as that seemed to work for the other pinners.

You can see from the pics I've loaded below the dimples and warping in the baked pieces as well as the size differences between the baked and unbaked pieces.  The smallest Collin piece may end up being useful.    The others are trash.  I'll have to step out to the bakery tomorrow and pick up some more goodies so I can use the containers to try to get the rest of them right.  I've got plenty of jump beads laying around needing uses, but not many chains, so perhaps a trip to the craft store is in order, also.  After all, I have to keep myself busy while I'm waiting on this baby to arrive.  I'll be 9 days past due tomorrow and I'm about to lose my mind!