About this deal
Shrinky Dinks the brand was big in the 80s, when kids could colour in these line art drawing, pre-printed on special thin plastic sheets which, when heated would shrink right down to become thicker and more rigid.
Most sets are pre-printed with outline images of popular children's characters or other subjects, which are then colored in before baking. For businesses such as resorts, holiday parks and fetes – how about creating a traceable image of your mascot? You can print on crystal clear shrink plastic sheets, as long as your printer is an ink jet printer.Line artwork works best, and we have found that embroidery templates or colouring sheets are a great place to find the shapes that work well as outlines. Cut the design into your preferred shape, then lay your shrinky dink on an aluminum-lined baking tray, rough-side-up. We have plenty more projects like the how to make shrinky dinks tutorial for you right here on Gathered. This works fine if you are a paper crafter who can stamp with archival inks, or you have a great selection of permanent coloured pens, but your average crafter does not. Shrinky Dinks were invented in 1973 by Betty Morris and Kate Bloomberg, two housewives in Brookfield, Wisconsin, as a Cub Scout project with their sons.
Pull it immediately from the oven and quickly while it is still very hot wrap it around a Chap-stick tube. Before using my oven for food I turned it on to 400 degrees and let it bake for about 20 minutes to get rid of the smell. If there are no specific guidelines that comes with your shrink plastic sheets, this is what we would use.
It is a polystyrene plastic sheet that is designed to shrink to less than half its original size whilst still retaining the same shape and colour. However, all you need is a little grade 0 glass paper or fine sandpaper which lets you gently roughen the surface of the shrink plastic sheet. If you are using permanent markers, you can skip this step if you ant to, but other colouring methods will need this textured surface to stick to the shrink plastic sheet. If using an oven, we’d recommend baking for about 4 minutes before you take it out, and you can still watch the shrinking happening through the oven door! When heated, the cut shapes become about nine times thicker while their horizontal and vertical dimensions reduce to about one-third the original size, resulting in hard, flat forms which retain their initial color and shape.