Shrinky Dink Flowers & Leaves

One of my biggest thrift store scores was a box of Shrinky Dink shrink plastic sheets, about 200 sheets for $4. (It pays to open mysterious cardboard boxes!) In craft stores a pack of 10 runs about $7. For this project, I only needed one sheet. This was such a fun project that I worked on last night, if you have the tools and supplies, you will have so much fun with this. I don’t know what it is about shrinking plastic that really gets me going!
With a flower shape punch, I punched out several flowers. Then with a small paper hole-punch, center punched each.
For the leaves, I used a scalloped edge circle punch and made several circles that I again ran back through the punch in halves to create 2 separate leaves per circle, colored them with a marker and punched small holes in the end of each.
Following the Shrinky Dink heating directions, I baked each flower individually to shrink (about 20 seconds each in my toaster oven), scraped them onto a stack of cut craft foam sheets and immediately, while the flower was warm, squished with the end of a paintbrush to create a bowl effect.
I then baked all my leaves at once.
With tiny glass beads, headpins, jump rings and pliers, I created the finished flowers.
Threading two beads through worked best for the center to stick out a bit from the bowl of the flower. I then stacked the flower and created a bend in the wire.
Wrapping the wire around round-nose pliers, I left an opening to thread on one leaf.
I finished with a few twists and a snip of the wire cutters.
Finally, clustering flowers and leaves with jump rings I made a few different small bouquets pendants.
VARIATIONS: Try different flower shapes and coloring techniques. Colored pencils create a very dark and rich result when baked, whereas markers are a bit more subtle. Use a fine-point Sharpie pen to write your childrens’ names or motivational words on the leaves Also, with printable Shrinky Dink sheets that you can feed through your printer, you can go wild with patterns, etc.