My kids are always interested in doing projects and today's was a lot of fun! I had seen a few blogs before about using Number 6 plastic to make shrinky dinks. I thought this would make a great project for the kids to do to make little ornaments for our tree or to decorate the house for Christmas. It also recycles some plastic that would otherwise end up in our trash!
The first thing I had to do was find some Number 6 plastic. I read that it has to be this because the other plastic will not work. I have been looking all around and even tried searching on google to see what I needed to keep an eye out for. I finally found some yesterday at our Expat Pre-Thanksgiving Feast. The top of the precooked chicken container and the premade pie tin top were both Number 6 plastic! Time to do our project!
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To do this, you need Number 6 plastic, scissors and permanent markers. We cut the plastic up into little pieces and colored on them. We made some that would look like icicles or cute earrings. We also found a book with little black and white sketch drawings of animals and other objects and traced some of those. So you color the plastic how you want and then punch a hole in it if you plan to hang it up. (The holes I made were WAY too small after shrinking. My husband said a whole punch would be better.) Measure them before you cook them so the kids can see how much they shrink!
Preheat the oven (we used a toaster oven) to 325 degrees. Then put all of the pieces on top of a cookie sheet and stick them in for about 1-2 minutes. You will see the plastic twist up and then lay flat again. It's amazing!! When they come out, they have shrunk into a hard little piece of plastic (and they may leave a stain on your cookie sheet if you put them on with the marker side down).
Stick a string in them and hang them on the tree. You can even make little Santa heads or Christmas trees and use them as earrings or on a necklace. These are so cute and end up being super tiny, so make sure that your pieces of plastic start out being 4-5" if you want 1-2" at the end. My kids are now trying to color all the scraps and make tiny shrunken pieces just for fun.
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All images are mine, taken by me on my camera phone.