Project 15: Shrinky Dinks!

Inspired by my friend Danielle's recent project of Shrinky-Dinks, I decided to have a little shrinking fun myself. I bought a cheap kit at the dollar store earlier today. When I opened it up I was surprised to find that you had to draw the designs onto the plastic. I seem to remember that back in the day, the plastic already had the outlines on it and all you had to do was color them. But, with the freedom to draw whatever I wanted I decided to include My Little Pony and a few Halloween images. 

I traced each design onto the clear shrinky-dink plastic and then colored them all using a wide variety of markers (the dollar store package only had two small markers with it). After I had traced and colored all of the images that I wanted to include on the plastic sheet, I cut them out carefully and placed them on aluminum foil on a cookie sheet.

Only takes about two minutes for these babies to cook. And when they come out they are reduced in size by about fifty percent. It's a fun and silly project. I had to add My Little Pony to mix because Danielle mentioned in her video blog that she remembers when she used to do My Little Pony Shrink-Its when she was a kid. So in the spirit of revisiting both our childhoods I traced a few choice MLP characters. I only had Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, and Pinkie Pie on hand otherwise I probably would have only done ponies.

If you look at the first picture of the designs laying on the college ruled notebook, you can see how the ponies take up about six rows before cooking and only take up about three rows after cooking. They are so tiny now! The ponies, skulls, and Halloween thingies all fit in my hand with room to spare. Not quite sure what I'm going to do with them all yet, but it might be fun to drill tiny holes and make an itty-bitty mobile out of them. So to sum up: I did Shrinky Dinks. What did I learn? Choosing my own designs was more fun than having the designs preset. I'm sure I learned something else, too, but I'm still too groggy in the head right now to come up with it. Did I complete the project? Yes. With the help of Narcisa. She loves to get up on the table whenever we do crafts. Today she helped me color by rubbing her face all over the end of the marker as I was trying to stay in the lines. She's a good kitty.