How to Make Shrinky Dinks

Take one sheet out of the pack and run a thumb over both faces. Ruff n Ready sheets come pre-frosted, so one side is rough and the other is slick. The rough side is the one you draw on. Pigment grabs that texture and stays put, where ink on the glossy face beads up and wipes off on your hand.

Plain clear shrink plastic exists too, and it needs a pass with fine sandpaper before it will take pencil or paint. Buying the frosted kind skips that job.

Lay a ruler across the top of the sheet and put a pencil notch every half inch. Go back over the notches with a fine point Sharpie and write a number at each full inch, out to six. It takes two minutes and it is the most useful thing on the finished card.

Once this bakes, you can hold it against any drawing and read the real shrink off it. The rule of thumb is about a third of the original size, which is hard to picture until you own a ruler that has been through the oven.

Rule a column of one inch squares down the sheet in pencil. Outline the first in fine point Sharpie, fill half of it in solid, and write the material name beside it. Leaving the other half empty lets you judge line weight and solid coverage on the same square.

Do the same for a Sharpie pen, which lays a thinner line, and for two colored pencils blended into each other. Prismacolor blends well on paper and takes more work on plastic, which is worth knowing before you commit to a real piece.

Load a brush with two acrylic colors and work them together inside the last square, then label it. Paint sits on top of shrink plastic instead of soaking in, so blending is stubborn and the coat stays slightly raised.

This square earns its place after baking. Run a fingernail across it and the paint scratches, and so does the colored pencil. The Sharpie does not. That is your answer on whether a finished piece needs a coat of varnish, resin or clear nail polish before anyone wears it.

Use a one inch circle punch on the spare part of the sheet and keep the circle, because it bakes down into a neat disc. Take one corner off the card with a corner rounder so you can see how a curve holds its shape.

Cut a few loose squares too and trim two sides of each with decorative scissors, one pattern per square, labeled. Scallops and zigzags come out of the oven sharper and smaller than you expect, and a wide pattern needs a longer strip before it reads at all.

Punch any hole you are going to need while the plastic is still thin. Shrinking makes it far thicker and much harder, and a hole punch will not bite through a finished piece. There is no fixing this afterwards short of a drill.

Put a mini punch and a standard punch on the same test piece. Both holes close up as the sheet shrinks, and seeing the two finished sizes side by side tells you which one leaves room for a jump ring or a length of wire.

Line a baking sheet with foil and set the pieces on it color side up, with space between them. Group similar sizes on the same tray. Small pieces finish in about a minute and a large card can take the full three, so a mixed tray means pulling something too early.

Bake at 325F with the oven door shut. The pieces curl up hard, sometimes folding right over on themselves, then relax and flatten back out. Give them another 30 seconds after they flatten, then take the tray out.

Straight out of the oven, press any piece that came out wavy under the flat bottom of a glass or a bowl. One second of pressure while the plastic is hot is enough. Large pieces curl at the corners more than small ones, so the cheat sheet itself usually wants this.

Then leave everything alone until the pan is cold. Warm shrink plastic still bends, and picking a piece up too soon puts a kink in it that will not come out. Big pieces hold heat longer than they look like they should.