KOLA Designs

Remember the 70’s themed wedding invitations I posted a couple weeks ago?? (Check them out here if you missed them!)  Well, that wedding took place last Friday on July 13, 2012 and it was EPIC!  Seriously, an amazing party, not to mention a very sweet outdoor ceremony.   It was so much fun to see the guests show up in their 1970’s themed apparel, and the groomsmen were dressed oh so appropriately in their powder blue tuxedos!

Well, as I was putting together my outfit for the festivities, I realized I didn’t have any earrings to match!  What’s a crafty girl to do?? Make my own, of course!  If you recall, the invitations were designed as records, so I thought I’d carry the idea through and use them as inspiration for the earrings.

Here’s a quick how-to on making your own record style earrings out of shrink plastic!

To start off, I cut circles from the Shrinky Dink material at 3.5″ (I used a large punch I had on hand, but using the deep cut blade and multi-cut, you can cut the plastic with your Cricut machine).   I punched two 1/8″ holes in the circles – one for the center of the record, and the other near the edge, to attach my earring piece to later on.

I then used some scrap card stock and punched a smaller circle to use as a template for the center of the record.

Using the template, I created my “label” with an alcohol marker in a colour to match my dress, and then coloured the “vinyl” part of the record with varying shades of grey and black.  The shades kind of disappeared once the plastic shrunk, so I think in the future I’d try using the white Shrinky Dink material instead of the clear, to see if it kept the shades better.  Since I was using clear though, I did opt to colour both sides of my “records.”

I use a craft heater to heat up my shrink plastic projects.  A few pieces of advice:

• use a heat resistant mat of some kind on the surface you are creating on, but beware that the surface below will get hot too!
• find a tool that you can use (like an embossing stylus) to keep your project from going all over the place while heating – place the tip of the stylus in the hole you have punched, but try not to let the melting plastic come in contact with another kind of plastic (like the rubber handles sometimes on these styluses… speaking from experience lol 😉 )
• Don’t freak out when the piece you’re shrinking curls up and looks like there’s no way it could ever flatten out!  Keep heating the piece evenly, and surprisingly it {usually} will flatten out
• Remember that it should shrink to about a 1/3 it’s original size – this is good to consider in the planning stages
• Colours will get darker / brighter as the object shrinks

My completed pair of earrings!  Since the shading I did on the record didn’t seem to come out when they had been shrunk, I decided to add some detail by scratching a few lines into the records using the tip of my embossing stylus.

Here’s a little peek into the rest of the day!!

Thanks so much for stopping by!!