Shrinky Plastic Bracelet Tutorial

Crafty recycled workshop
Today I had the privilege of working with one of my WI groups again.  Today's workshop was to create a charm bookmark or bracelet.

Here is the result of my demo tutorial i gave to my very lovely friend Janey (she is so fab!  I even had to talk to her like I was presenting to a large group! needless to say there was a lot of giggling!)  Anyhow, mine is on the right and hers on the left!  They are just so pretty.  

Well to break it down here is what we made.

1 - charm from cereal boxes and paper offcuts

1 - flower made from plastic bottles

2 - charms made from old envelopes

2 - charms made from shrinkable plastic

several charms made from upcycled beads.

After constructing our various charms and heating where necessary we assembled them on a short length of chain with large jump rings.  I love the colours of these, I have always disliked orange terrible but I have quite a liking for it now!

Here are some of the lovely creations the WI ladies made today.  Unfortunatly I only remember to take a couple of pics so there are no images for the lovely bracelets.

 I thought I would share a quick tutorial with you, not to make these bookmarks (all these techniques would take a while) but just to make the shrinkable ones!  I will no doubt do tutorials for the others at some point!

Shrinky bracelet

To make this bracelet I used - Artist grade shrink plastic, permanent markers, Stazon ink, clear stamps and acrylic block and a heat gun.

In the interest of recycling you can use plastic container and bottles, however the only ones that will shrink are plastics with a 6 on them.  Also always work in a well ventilated room when heating plastics.

Step 1 - I cut some 2x2.5" rectangles and punched holes in the short ends using a hole punch.  I also used a corner punch to round my corners so that it wasn't all sharp once heated.

Step 2 - colour your squares with permanent marker.  I only coloured one side as the other will be against my wrist.

Step 3 - Now for some highly ridiculous reason I forgot to take a picture of this bit.  But you will need to stamp your stamps on each piece.  I used two different sets for mine.  Remember your designs will shrink down 45% so bigger designs usually look good.  You are best using a permanent ink here, I used Stazon.

Step 4 - As I had so many pieces I put mine in the oven on 200`c and watched them like a hawk until they finished shrinking and were lying flat, however if you want to you can use a heat gun (not a hair dryer or paint stripper)

Here they are!  I discovered that using the lightest colours I could produced the best results, this is because as the plastic shrinks the colours intensify and darken.  If you start out with a dark colour you can't see your stamping so well.

Step 5 - using large jump rings I attached the sections together.  As you can see above I did more pieces than I needed, however this meant I could choose the best for my bracelet and I learnt about the colour differences so win win!

So here is the finished piece.  I popped a claw clasp at one end and joined the rings on the other end together with another jump ring.

As always do pop by my shop on the link below if you would like to see exactly what I used for this tutorial.

Look forward to hearing any of your shrinky plastic news or makes xx