Hi this is Megan with beadaholique.com and and going to show you how to use
Shrink Plastic in Jewelry Making
the Shrink Plastic that we are carrying
is by Inkssentials
this is from Ranger and it looks like this
in your package, clearly I've used this package. Yours won't look like this
you're going to get
five sheets
of clear Shrink Plastic
there are several different types of Shrink Plastic, this is type we're carrying
right now so all of
what I'm gonna tell you is going to refer to this type of shrink plastic
because there are also some frosted ones and
different versions
so I'm going to kind of just do it overview of
some of the ways that you can use clear Shrink Plastic
I'll show you a couple of projects that I've made
I made this pendant
and this pendant actually been
designed on two sides
I used colored pencils
on the back side
and
rubber stamped on the front side
it can give you kind of a dimensional look if you do both sides of the
Shrink Plastic like that
then I have
these fun little earrings
and these are with permanent marker on
so you can
kind of
do whatever you want with shrink plastic it's kind of only limited by your
imagination
I'm not going to do one specific project I'm just going to kind of give you an
overview of different
techniques that you can use on the shrink plastic
so
one of the main
things is going to be what you used to color
your shrink plastic which is what you use to make your design
you can
on regular shrink plastic, if it hasn't
had anything done to it
you can use
permanent makers
you can use different colors
of permanent markers, I'm going to put this white paper down so you can
see better on the white background
and the permanent marker
as you go across
well give you a little little bit of a texture but
it won't show up all that much
the one thing
to keep in mind
I guess two things, there's two things to keep in mind when you're designing
your colors and shapes and layouts for shrink plastic
is that one, your design is gonna shrink, it's going to end up being anywhere from
one-third to one-half
the size
and the other thing is that your colors are going to get darker and more
saturated
so I can give you an example of both of those things
with this
leftover piece here
on this left over piece here you can see
these heart shapes
are the heart shaped that I used for these earrings
so you can see
that the color got dark and intense
and how much smaller they are also
you are going to need to plan accordingly, you need to
make your piece
much larger and also you wanna use a lighter shade, it's gonna get a lot more
intense, the colors
one thing you can do is
use just a little piece of shrink plastic and bake it and make a swatch,
a sample so you can see what the color and size is going to do
Another thing about when it shrinks is that you're going to want to make sure
that your
placing your designs
straight along the grain of the plastic
they've basically taken
plastic and stretched it two ways
and then when you heat it up it condenses back into its original
size
so you don't want to cut a square
crooked
because then it's not going to remain nice and square
when it bakes so you want to go ahead and
use the straight edge of the plastic and
make sure your shapes are straight
on the grain of the plastic when you're
planning that out
and also if you're gonna have shapes
where you have more than one and you want them to be uniform
you'll line them up all
the same way all facing up and down the same way
going back to different
ways you can color like I said you can use permanent marker
you can also use a permanent ink pad
and we carry several colors of the StazOn ink
in this project here I've just taken
the StazOn ink
on an ink pad
and just made
different little
stampings and
kinda made a little random pattern
and again you can see I used this intense purple color but
by the time
I baked it's almost black
again it's gonna get darker and the
fun thing with the
rubber stamping is it almost gets a little bit of a raised texture to it
if you're gonna go for that look
you can actually also use acrylic paint
and that will give
a kind of raised up
bubbled surface
so that can be a fun
way to go if you want a really intense
opaque color
one of the other more common ways
to color shrink plastic is with colored pencils
you're actually going to need to rough up the shrink plastic
you'll use a fine grit sand paper
and along
the grain of the shrink plastic
you're just going to sand side to side
and then you're going to go completely perpendicular
to what you just did, go up and down
so you're going to do a cross hatch pattern like that and
the end result should be a
frosted kind of a look to your
shrink plastic
and then you can just take
regular colored pencils
with that texture on there they will
now stick to the shrink plastic and you're gonna wanna wipe away
any little bits of
the colored pencil lead
otherwise you won't have a nice smooth even surface and again don't
forget these colors are going to intensify a lot when you
bake the plastic
they're a good way to color because you'll get a nice soft
color and then it will get brighter
when it bakes
so as far as the designs
that you do
if you want to do
designs with rubber stamp
that's really easy, also the great thing about the clear plastic
is that you can trace
show you can
take the plastic
and put it right down over
some kind of design that you wanna trace. I took my initial m and I just
on a word processing program
made it really and printed it out
and now I could go in
and just
trace that
and color it in
you're going to wanna make it nice and big because it's going to get
a lot smaller
you can go and just use
the transparency
as a tool
and just color that in
and again
you can also do layering so you can take
colored pencil or permanent marker
background
on one side or
and then you could use rubber stamp or a different marker on the front
side and it will give you an interesting kind of
three-dimensional
layered look, now to cut out
your design
there are several ways
that you can cut
shrink plastic
you can of course use
craft scissors
you can also use a craft knife like an exacto blade
if you're going to be cutting out designs from the middle
that's a good way to do it
another really handy
thing
is that you can actually use paper punches
so with
these earrings, the cute little hearts
I just used a heart shaped paper punch that we carry on Beadaholique.com. We also have
some squares and circles
the important thing is to make sure you have a large enough punch because they
do
shrink down so much. So if you're going to do something small
like this you can definitely use
this size punch
if you want to do something larger
like this pendant here. I actually just measured
a square out of the corner with a ruler and my square
I'm not kidding it was about that big
just like I said you can do a swatch you see how the size
are going to change, it is
about a half to a third the size of the original
so you can also get really big jumbo punches
the other handy part about using punches
is that you can get a
one-eighth
up to one quarter-inch
round hole punch
and use that
for making
the holes
for hanging your piece, so I've used that here to make the hole for my jump ring
and that's
I have an eight-inch punch and it's just about perfect for fitting
a standard jump ring
so once you have your piece
ready to go
and cut out
there are instructions on the back of the shrink plastic
for baking
I just wanna give one note is that
I have a dedicated toaster oven they use for polymer clay and shrink plastic
you can use this
they tell you you can use this in your regular oven
if you're going to use a lot though it's best to get a dedicated oven for it
like just a toaster oven and it doesn't need to be anything fancy, doesn't need
to be a convection just
the most basic toaster oven works really well
and you're gonna put it
in the oven
between three hundred and three hundred and fifty degrees
and they just tell you for several minutes and what's gonna happen
when you take
your piece of shrink plastic
and you put it in the oven first of all
I highly recommend putting in on
piece parchment
or a silicone baking mat or something like that
you're going want to use something that you're not good use for food
but you want it to be on a non-stick surface
and you put in
piece of shrink plastic
made to go on your parchment paper into the toaster oven or oven
and then you're gonna wanna watch it as it bakes because it's going to
curl up
into itself
and then flatten back down and as it flattens back down
you'll notice that it got a lot thicker and a lot smaller
and basically you wanna watch it get
all the way curled up
and all the way flat again
and once it's
all the way flat again
then you're ready to take it out of the oven so
don't be scared if it curls up, it almost always flattens out if you're doing a
particularly long or large piece
it might get kind of stuck and all you want to do is very carefully
pull it out of the oven and kind of
help it apart
and be super carefully you're not doing anything like that when it's hot but
you can also
lay a piece of parchment paper on top
it will it from
sticking to itself when it curls up, you just
need to be
able to see what's going on, so that you can see when flattens back out
usually only takes a few minutes
for the whole process also
said now that you have your
pieces of
shrunk plastic
out of the oven
you can see
on both of these
that they're shiny
and they don't
necessarily come out both sides shiny
it depends on how you treated it when you did the coloring
you can see this one is matte on the back and that's because
sanded the back to use the colored pencil on it
the front side
if u left it alone
will most likely still be shiny
as you can see
on these earrings I have both sides
all I did to this
was I used diamond glaze
one side at a time and made sure I tried not to get it in that hole
and I just put it on a thin coat and let it dry
flipped over and put it on the other side
on this piece
before I coated it
I'd just sanded the edges gently and I just
took the piece and you can see the little
they almost look like pencil lines
that's just for me running the edge
along the sand paper
because I cut out
a straight square with
sharp corners and I didn't want it to be too sharp so all I did was sand the edges
down
and if you have sharp corners
it's a good idea to go ahead and sand them just gently with fine grit
sandpaper
and I also put
diamond glaze
on the top
of this one to give it a shiny front
you can also put resin on the top if you want a
really nice high gloss
dome surface
that'll make your piece look really pretty and finished
you could also use a spray sealant
on there
you're gonna wanna seal it
with something for the most part just to keep
your your color and whatever you used
for the design
a little bit more permanent and it's important also
to note that you really don't want to get these wet even after you do
seal them
so don't wear them in the shower or the swimming pool
but as long as you seal them up they should be relatively vast and
they're pretty durable too, it gets really thick
so you can
do a lot of other techniques such as
bending
the plastic right when it comes out of the toaster oven. You do need to be really
careful with that because it is hot, that's a little bit more of
an advanced technique and for now I'm giving you basic an overview but
you can see that the possibilities are kind of endless
there's also many other things
that I'm not including here so
don't feel like you can't experiment and try new things or if you see something different
somewhere else you can definitely do this other ways
I'm giving you some of the the most common
techniques used
and that is an
overview of shrink plastic in jewelry making. Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!