Our earlier attempts with stamping has shown that Stazon inks work the best. With that in mind, Amanda and I took a trip to her local Michael's and Joann's Fabrics for some more ink and clear stamps. We saw a beautiful antique car on the road on our way to the craft stores!
While we didn't find any stamps we liked, we did find some more Stazon ink colors. We picked up teal, royal purple, and black. We noticed that while the physical store didn't have a large selection, you could find more colors of Stazon online.
Our observations on stamping on shrink plastics:
1. Stazon ink is the best. It adheres well to the plastic and when shrunk it is completely dry.
2. We noticed that the Stazon ink works the best with stamps that have more detail outlines in the design (see bunnies in image above). Any stamp with large areas of concentrated color had a tendency to pull the ink and it was hard to get color completely uniform in those areas (see pandas or the lady cameo in images above).
3. Color Box inks do not work at all. We had used a pink color on one of the bunny charms and shrunk it. Even after shrinking, the ink was still wet. Amanda let the charm sit overnight to see if it would dry and there was no change. You could wipe away the ink off the charm with your finger.
4. You can use a heat gun to shrink the plastic. We used Amanda's heat gun made by the Martha Stewart company. It works well, but we noticed that sometimes you well get a bubble texture after shrinking the plastic, but that might be due to what you use to flatten your plastic.
5. The clear Shrinky Dink plastic has a smooth texture after baking while the matte version has a grainy texture. It just depends on what look you are going for.
Something you need to keep in mind while working with Shrink Plastic or Shrinky Dinks is that if you are planning to work with the material on a regular basis, you need to invest in a small toaster oven. The fumes from the plastic can be harmful and you do not want to use the same toaster oven that you cook food in to constantly use for crafting.
I have a small toaster I bought from Target a couple of years ago that I use only for polymer clay and shrink plastic crafts. I had bought it for about $25.
After crafting for a bit, we went out and picked up hot dogs from Dog Haus again. We saw another lovely car in the parking lot.
I'm not sure what we have planned today. I think we might see if we can find a cross stitch store nearby. I was hoping we could go to the Needle in the Haystack store, but I hadn't realized it was about 7+ hours away, which would make it closer to San Francisco. Perhaps on a future trip, we'll get to go San Fran.
Until next time >____<
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