Daiso Maniac Saturday: #13 Shrink Plastic Pop Art Pendant

Pretty excited to introduce this week's Daiso Maniac. =)

It's Daiso's version of shrink plastic! I'm pretty sure those staying in the States (and UK?) are quite familiar with this stuff. I believe it's considered a childhood kind of toy? You draw on this thin sheet of plastic, cut out the design and let it sit in the oven. And magically, the plastic will start curling and shrinking until it lies flat again, but now appearing much smaller.

Fast forward to the 21st century, shrink plastic has been making a comeback and more designers out there have been experimenting with it. It's amazing to see how these talented people transform what might seem tacky and cheap-looking into something cool and artistic like this and this!

I had this idea of cutting out silhouettes and drew in some random pop art designs. And so I prepared

some black and white silhouettes print-out (Created the simple clouds, raindrops and lightning in illustrator... Got the swallow silhouette from google image searches), sharpie pens, some stamps, black StazOn ink, scissors, hole puncher and a heat gun (I do have a craft oven, but I was too lazy to take that out).

The first thing was to choose the silhouettes I wanted to use. I ended up selecting the cloud and lightning. So, I cut them out and placed them on the shrink plastic.

This was to facilitate me in optimizing the shrink plastic space as well as to know where I should draw. I drew a rough line separating the cloud from the lightning as well as from the rest of the piece of plastic which I would not touch. I then removed the cut-out pieces, and trimmed the plastic to the area I want.

I drew some random lines within the cloud area and started filling in designs.

Halfway-through! Prodding on...

Done! I'd also stamped some polka dots for the lightning area. It's nice to have a little irony. Gentle polka dots vs sharp edges. Nice! I made sure the inks were dried to the touch before flipping the plastic over.

I flipped my cut-outs and taped them to the areas I wanted. This step eliminates the need to trace the silhouette onto the plastic, risking any mess-ups. I then cut out the pieces using the paper cut-outs as a guide. For the lightning, I rounded the sharp edges a little. Wouldn't want to stab myself while wearing it!

Quite cool! Next, I punched out some holes which would eventually be for inserting jump rings.

To connect the lightning to the cloud!

To hold my rope

It's shrinking time! I used my handy heat gun to shrink the plastic. My trick was to use a pair of jewelry forceps to hold down the piece as well as to flip the piece for even heating.

Please use something like forceps to hold down the piece.

Once the plastic stopped unfurling and shrinking, I took my quilter's ruler and flattened my piece. This helps to iron out any unevenness on the surface... Let's compare how much the plastic had shrunk!

That's quite a lot, isn't it. One advice when dealing with shrink plastic is to check before-hand the amount of shrinkage the plastic is going to have. A square test is the best as some plastics shrink more in one direction.

I then coat the shrunk pieces with mod-podge and let dry before spraying them with some matte glaze.

And here's the final result!