Comments (29)

By Mom Unplugged, June 15, 2008 9:15 pm

Again, I had nothing in mind last week when I picked the Unplugged Project theme of plastic. I had saved a few yogurt cups, and a mayonnaise jar hoping for inspiration, but then I suddenly remembered a really cool project that I had come across once on StumbleUpon: genuine, DIY Shrinky Dinks (by Curbly blogger Chrisjob).

I grew up in the 1970′s, the era of Shrinky Dinks, so I was probably more excited about this project than my kids were (although they were pretty eager once I explained what would happen).

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1) In order to do this project, you’ll have to find some number 6 plastic containers. Grocery stores often use number 6 plastic boxes at their salad bars, or for their baked goods. I must have looked like a bit of an oddball at my local grocery picking up all the containers and raising them over my head to examine the bottoms! Be careful, because there were a few out there that looked like 6′s, but they were 5′s just lying in wait to trick me. Chrisjob suggests asking for a few free ones. I just decided it was a good excuse to buy some bran muffins…and strawberries (yes, they are number 6 too!).

20/20 hindsight advice - Try to choose containers that do not have stickers on them. The glue was very hard to remove and a few of our finished pieces were a little sticky on the back from residual glue.

2) You’ll also need colored Sharpies (permanent markers), scissors, and foil. As you see here, we bought a few key chain rings at the local art supply store since I thought the Shrinky Dinks might make a neat Fathers’ Day key chain:

3) First we cut the boxes up to create rectangles that were as large as possible. The plastic will shrink to about 30%-40% it’s original size, so keep that in mind when you cut.

4) Then we drew on them with the Sharpies. My kids did two each, one for their Dad, and one for their Pop Pop (my Dad). I did one for my Dad too!

5) I punched a hole in each piece with a hole puncher. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, but I thought it might be easier to put the hole in now, rather than later.

6) We arranged the plastic pictures on a sheet of foil:

and put it in a preheated, 350 degree oven (177 celsius). Be sure to put the foil directly on the oven rack, with the rack at the bottom of the oven.

The shrinking is very quick. Chrisjobs says total time for a large, 5″to 6″ piece would be about 3 1/2 minutes. Ours was done in more like two, but it was also smaller to begin with, about 3 to 4″x 2 to 3″. He recommends opening the oven after about 90 seconds if you don’t have a window so as not to overcook.

We “oohed” and “aahed” in unison! It was quite spectacular. First the pieces move and curl up. Then they get smaller and smaller and eventually flatten out again.

7) When you remove them they are still soft for a very short period (10-15 seconds) if you want to bend them or shape them somehow. But be careful, they are hot. They quickly cool and become hard. You’ll notice that they are thicker too, about the thickness of a coin:

The pre-punched hole worked well. It shrank too, but remained large enough for the key chain. If there are any rough or sharp edges you can easily sand them off.

Here is the finished Daddy key chain:

And the Pop Pop key chain:

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Some other Shrinky Dink links and projects/ideas:

• Make gorgeous, funky rings: Shrink Plastic Ring Tutorial from PlanetJune

• Cute Shrinky Dink Pins from Wee Wonderfuls

• 14 kids’ shrink art projects

• Shrinky Dink Wine Glass Charms

• Shrinky Dink Mobile

• If you don’t want to scour the grocery store, then you can buy shrink plastic sheets online, or at your local craft store (they come in clear or frosted). You can also buy shrink plastic sheets for inkjet printers so you can print words or clipart, then shrink.

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If you did a plastic Weekly Unplugged Project, then please put your link in Mr. Linky so that I, and others, can easily find you to gain a little inspiration. Please leave a comment too, in case Mr. Linky malfunctions.

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Since I enjoyed the week where we just had a simple adjective as a theme (sticky), for next week’s Unplugged Project I thought we would try that again. The theme will be:

old

(Remember, the association can be very loose, so use your imagination!)

Hope to see you here for old!

Comments (24)

By Mom Unplugged, June 8, 2008 10:17 pm

When I chose sticky as the theme for this week’s Unplugged Project, I really had nothing in mind. I just thought a general, descriptive word would encourage a lot of very different, creative responses! We’ll see if I was right.

All week I thought and thought about what to do, and finally resorted to a little online inspiration. Here I found instructions for making a “Faux Leather Pencil Holder” using masking tape and shoe polish. That sounded very intriguing, but I didn’t think the kids would find brown “faux leather” terribly inspiring, and I wasn’t sure that working with stinky, messy shoe polish would have a happy outcome. So, since masking tape qualifies as sticky and it did sound fun and easy, we experimented and modified this idea a bit.

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For this project you’ll need something to decoupage. My daughter chose a can and I found a dented metal picture frame that I had been going to toss out. You’ll also need masking tape, white glue, and food coloring:

There were a few sharp points around the rim of the can, so I squashed those down with some pliers and then covered the rim with tape to make it safer.

My daughter and I tore off little bits of masking tape and stuck them haphazardly over the surface of our objects. I think the final effect is prettiest if you try to have the tape edges as ragged as possible and use lots of small pieces rather than fewer larger ones.

Here is how they looked when completely covered with tape:

Next we put some glue in cups and added a little water to thin it slightly. Be careful not to add too much water, as I did the first time around! We then added some food coloring to create different colors:

We brushed the colored glue onto our tape-covered objects. The first coat was quite pale and uninspiring:

We let that dry a bit, and then brushed on another coat. I did a total of three coats, my daughter did two, so hers turned out a bit paler. I think next time I might even do a fourth coat. The extra coats of color really do add depth.

The effect is quite pretty. The colored glue sticks more to the edges of the tape making the tape edges darker than the rest, for almost a crackle effect. I finished off by spraying our projects with some acrylic for a bit more shine and durability.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I would definitely try this again, as we all love decoupage. Working with the tape was easy and fun! I would like to experiment with paint mixed with glue, or even just thinly wiped-on paint (but I wanted the glue in there to create a bit of shine).

Different color effects would be interesting to try too. Using paint with glue, or paint alone would make for more subtle color possibilities. I think wiping some adjacent colors gently with a cloth, could make a nice blended transition between colors. A rainbow effect would be pretty.

Other fun things to try this with: Easter eggs, boxes, framed mirrors, notebooks, furniture … almost anything really!

This was an easy and satisfying project. Total time: maybe 1 hour.

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If you joined us for this week’s sticky Unplugged Project, then please put your link in Mr. Linky. Please leave a comment too, so that your project will still be findable if Mr. Linky fails.

If you didn’t join us this week, then consider joining in next week! Read how here.

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The theme for next Monday’s Unplugged Project will be:

Plastic

I hope to see you then!

Comments (23)

By Mom Unplugged, June 1, 2008 8:12 pm

We’ve been getting so fancy lately with our Unplugged Projects, that this week I decided to keep it simple. It was a warm, unscheduled day full of happy play, indoors and out. An 8 year-old visiting school friend was here for the afternoon, so I just set out watercolors, washable tempera paints, paper, and crayons and let them have at it to see what they would do.

At first they just painted and tried a little wax-resist with a white crayon:

Then our friend had the idea of pouring on paint and folding the paper in half to make “ink blot-style” paintings. My oldest daughter and her friend had fun with this for quite a while. Here is our friend’s first “ink-blot” piece, a butterfly:

Here are some more:

And a few of the finished paintings:

My 5 year-old son did a bit of real painting, but he was more in the mood to do his paint with water book. If you are not familiar with these, they are like coloring books, but the pages are pictures filled in with colored dots. All you do is brush water over the page to make the colors emerge and appear to have been painted. Not the most creative activity in the world, but quite fascinating really. In fact, I distinctly remember absolutely LOVING paint with water books at about his age. This one is Babar (from the local dollar store):

I wisely left my little 2 year-old daughter bare chested for the project. By the time she had finished her purple masterpiece she was, herself, also a purple masterpiece:

A good time was had by all, and some very fine art resulted from our fun!

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Did you paint with us this week? If so, then please put a link to your project in Mr. Linky. If not, then consider joining in next week. It’s easy and fun. Click here for more information.

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The theme for next week’s Unplugged Project is a little different. I’m just going to leave you all with an adjective:

Sticky

This doesn’t mean that the project needs to leave your kids and your house a sticky, horrible mess! Free associate with sticky: Tape? Glue? Velcro? Honey? etc. etc. etc.

Good luck and I can’t wait to see what we all do for sticky!

Comments (21)

By Mom Unplugged, May 25, 2008 8:09 pm

Above you can see the product of this week’s Unplugged Project theme of metal: a knitted hamster.

I know what you’re thinking: “Wait a minute, the theme was metal, why is she showing us a knitted hamster?” Well, my point here is to prove just how flexible the Unplugged Project can be.

This is not just any old knitted hamster, it is a hamster that was knitted on a homemade tin can knitter. A tin can is made of metal. Voilà! There is the connection! Our finished product was made of yarn, but it was made by using something metal, so it “counts.”

This type of knitting apparatus is known as a French Knitter, a Corker, a Spool Knitter, a Mushroom Knitter, a Knitting Nancy, a Knitting Knobby, and a few other names too I believe. My daughter has a commercially produced wooden one like this with four prongs that produces long, narrow, “snakes.” But you can easily make these knitters yourself (see links at the end of this post).

For even more fun, you can make big ones with various sizes of tin can which will produce different sizes of knitted tube. Ours is made from a 15 ounce can.

I found the instructions for the knitter and the hamster in the wonderful book Corking (Kids Can Easy Crafts) by Judy Sadler and Linda Hendry. There are also some instructions online here.

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Here is how we made it:

You will need a clean tin can, some finishing nails (small heads) that are about 1.5″ long, and some sturdy tape. Small nail heads are important because the knitting process involves slipping loops of yarn up over the top of the nails, so you don’t want the yarn to get stuck on the nail heads. The book calls for cloth tape, but all I could find was colorful duct tape and that worked fine despite being a bit annoying to cut (I recommend slicing it with a box cutter instead of using scissors, which tend to stick):

First we removed the bottom of the can. You can usually do it with a can opener, but sometimes the bottom edge is rounded and must be removed with a dremel tool, or small saw. My advice: make sure you use a can whose bottom rim is narrow enough to be removed with a can opener.

Beware of sharp edges. I had a sharp shard that was sticking out on my can, so I squashed it down with some pliers, and then wrapped both raw edges with the tape.

Next apply a strip of tape just under the lip of the can sticky side out. Stick a pair of nails side by side (they should be touching) to the tape. Make sure to have about half an inch of the nail sticking up above the can edge and the other inch below. In order to knit, the nails must be stable so you’ll want a lot of the nail to be attached to the can:

Put another pair of nails on opposite the first. Continue putting on sets of nails around the can. It doesn’t have to be scientifically precise, but try and space them about 5/8th” (1.5cm) apart. After all the nails are stuck to the can, wrap a few strips of tape all the way around the diameter of the can to hold the nails in place.

Press the tape down between each pair of nails. Next cut short strips of tape and apply them to the can between the pairs of nails like this:

Wrap more tape around the diameter of the can. I did two layers of tape, and finished off with more little strips between the nails for added stability and to cover up any raw sticky edges. You can either leave your can like that, or decorate it with glued on paper, fabric , or ribbon. We glued some fabric on and this is what we ended up with:

You can experiment with different sized cans which will produce different sized knitted tubes. If you use a jumbo, restaurant-sized can, you can even make an infant hat!

This was so much fun that after my daughter finishes her own hamster (which is well underway), I think I will steal the knitter back and make some nice, cozy socks for my two year-old. The tube that comes off this sized can looks to be just about the right size for her feet!

So that is it for the metal part of our post. If you want to know how to make the hamster, then you should buy Corking, or borrow it from the library.

LINKS:

Make a Sculpey Clay Spool Knitter

Make a Spool knitter out of a wooden thread spool

Spool Knitting (instructions on how to make a knitter, and how to knit)

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What did your family make for the theme metal? If you did a metal Unplugged Project this week, then please leave your link in Mr. Linky (and a comment in case Mr. Linky malfunctions and I have to remove him).

If you didn’t join us, then feel free to explore everyone’s projects to get inspired, and please consider joining us next week. You don’t have to do anything fancy or complicated! For more information on the Unplugged Project as well as instructions about how to participate even if you don’t have a blog, read more here.

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Next week’s Unplugged Project theme will be:

Paint

So far we’ve done quite a few Unplugged Projects that used paint, but I don’t think that it has ever been the theme before. Hope to see you here next week!

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Comments (14)

By Mom Unplugged, May 19, 2008 6:56 am

Sorry this didn’t get up last night, but when I went to post it, my site was down! The support people told me that there was a “migration” taking place on my server. “Oh, of course!” I said with knowledgeable techie certainty, but I was really thinking: “Isn’t that what geese do?”

I decided that whatever it was, it sounded important enough to take a Long Time, so I went to bed. I’m happy to report that the geese did not fly away with my site, as it is back this morning. So finally, here’s my post:

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This week’s theme, chosen by my oldest daughter, was ribbon. It seems that she had bookmarks in mind when she chose that theme. In between running around outside in the glorious weather, and despite my lack of preparation, we somehow managed to make two kinds of ribbon bookmarks for this week’s Unplugged Project.

As usual, I had not prepared for this project and at the last minute we scoured the house for odd bits of ribbon or anything that we might be able to use. Here’s what we found:

My daughter wanted to decorate a bookmark-length ribbon with glitter glue, buttons, and flat beads. First she cut a length of wide ribbon, and then she added some glitter glue, and positioned some beads and buttons that I glued on with the glue gun. Here is her finished book mark:

For my book mark, I decided to do a bit more experimenting with weaving with pipecleaners. I attached four pipecleaners at the top like this:

Then I tied two different colored ribbons at the top too. I then weaved the ribbons between the pipecleaners, twisting the two ribbons together as I went along:

When I had about 2 inches of pipecleaner unwoven at the end, I stopped and knotted the ribbons around the pipecleaners. I then threaded beads on the ends of each pipecleaner, and a few on the ribbon ends. TIP: To thread beads onto fat ribbons, wrap the end in scotch tape (so it is kind of like the end of a shoelace) thread the beads, then cut off the tape:

I also added a few beads to the hanging ends of the ribbon at the top of the bookmark, just to dress it up a bit. Here is my final product:

I was rather pleased with the result of this. It would be fun to experiment with different colors and widths of ribbon instead of just using what one has on hand.

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Did you join us this week? If so, then link to your ribbon project post in Mr. Linky and please leave a comment.

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The theme for next week’s Unplugged Project :

Metal

I look forward to seeing your wonderful ideas! Hopefully the geese will leave my server alone from now on, and my post should be up Sunday night as usual. Enjoy your week!

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