Thing-a-day.com

I think I was looking at Craft’s blog when I stumbled upon a great tutorial on how to make beads from recycled newspaper. Today I decided to give that tutorial a try and I’m partially through the process. The beads take several days to dry so it’ll be a while before I can paint them, hopefully by the 29th! Yikes! Anyway, I boiled the water with the newspapers inside and waited for about an hour and then rolled the beads, which took about twenty minutes or so.

While I waited I made some more shrinky dinks:

a black cat with big yellow eyes (in honor of my ever-so-curious feline companion Phoebe who modeled for me), an owl and a friendly heart.

I’ve been inspired to do shrinky dinks after seeing all the cool things people are doing here at thing-a-day. thefabricator had fun with them yesterday, shinwa made a really cool keychain for her husband on the 19th, craftkeg made some neat buttons on the 18th, and before rakka made the awesome cheeto Britney and Bender Easter egg, there was the terribly cute shrinky dink cloud necklace, and of course, Lu’s been having a field day with it, the shrinky dink owl necklace being my favorite of her many creations. I had just had to join all the cool kids just to see what the fun is all about.

I used some number 6 plastic I had from some store bought food items, sanded them down, and drew/colored them in with pencils. I did the two square ones with a black sharpie just to see the difference in sharpness in color variation, both the squares being one inch squares to measure the shrinkage. Just to see how the metal pin would fair, I made the five pipped die side with the pin stuck inside per instructions on wee wonderfuls shrinky dink pins. They all came out pretty good for a first time, I think. In the future, I’m going to invest in a nice set of permanent markers to do these in. I think they’d come out looking more vivid instead of dulled like my robot kind of does.

Continuing with the kid’s craft theme, I also picked up some shrinky dinks at the craft store the other day. I started out just making random drawings, like a pig, lady bug, and a little worm. My roommate’s friend drew an awesome turtle, but unfortunately it didn’t survive the baking. We thought it would make a cute bookmark, but it curled all up on itself.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t realize quite how much they shrink, or how thick they get. It’s amazing - it starts off like a thin flexible sheet, and you end up with a hard plastic. So cool! So, before and after shots:

I made one of them into a necklace:

And then, after looking at them for a little while, I realized that I could make some really cool buttons…. so I did.