Oliver's Mess-Making Night with Mumma : Shrinky Dinks, Beads & Baubles

We used the following tutorial to make these beads.

Ingredients :
White Shrinky-Dink Sheet
Inks (alcohol based) with metallic shimmer
Stamps
Sandpaper
Soft Pastels (like chalks)

Oliver used permanent markers and ink stamps.

We decorated the sheets. Sandpaper helps rough up the surface so that the soft pastels stick to it (otherwise, it's too slick).




Cut them into pieces and bake them.

Beware : The blue piece above has a slight piece hanging off the edge. I thought that wouldn't be a problem because it would shrink up and they'd all fit on the pan. Well, when it shrunk up, it fell off the pan and onto the bottom of the oven .... Eeesh! That was a stinky mess. I wonder how many years I shaved off my life with that exposure!

They curl up and can get wavy.


The next step is to get the heat tool and re-heat and roll them into beads. I tried flattening the end pieces to get a "squarer" bead. But that didn't really seem to work very well.

Finally, I rubbed them with Rub n Buff as the the white edges were a little too stark.


Interesting side note (Surprise!) : The cup of rinse water for the paint brush (I painted my stamps with a brush) was amazing with the heavy metallic inks. It swirled and moved like The Northern LIghts.

I also decided to save that rinse water in a spray bottle to use as a color wash. We'll see how well it works.