Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Experiments in Shrink Plastic

Today I thought I'd play with something different. I had made a few shrink plastic charms a year or so before, just by painting one side with acrylic paint and then baking. I got frustrated with not being able to get small enough details onto the charms this way. I know you're supposed to be able to print on them as well; and I have long wanted to find a way to get my digital designs from my Cafepress shop onto a support that I could sell in my Etsy shop. So today, I tried to print out various graphic designs onto my clear shrink film.

As you can see to the right where I've just uploaded 4 new little charms to Izile's Oddities, it obviously did not go well.

After they had been fired, and I realized I was basically stuck with four perfectly nicely shaped, but blank, clear pendants, I had to think of what to do with them. I do hate throwing anything away.

So, I started out like I did with the little dangly charm off the bottom of my Magic Vial: Celestial Moon; I painted the dull side black. A few hours later, I decided to just stick with the same idea as that tiny dangly charm.

Each charm is painted in Gold Leaf with a different Chinese symbol. The first one I did is just painted simply with the symbol for "Beauty." I painted one for "Love," one for "Rose," and one for "Sunrise." It was a bit challenging to try and get photos that not only showed the rich Gold Leaf, but also the really glassy surface.

Considering they started out as a failed experiment, I think they turned out quite pretty! And, because they were a bit of a flook; I'm only selling them for $2.50 over in my Etsy shop.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that like Shrinky Dinks? Those things are fun!

Izile said...

Yeah, I think it's essentially the same thing. It's just these sheets of thin clear plastic, and once cut down and painted, you pop them in the oven and they shrink, get thicker and hard, and one side gets really glassy shiny.

It'd be a lot more fun if I could get it to work like the package suggests. I think little swirly poison dart frog charms would be so cute.