Shrinky Dinks and Clear Rubber Stamps

As kids we enjoyed not only using rubber stamps on rainy days, but we also loved doing Shrinky Dinks. Shrinky Dinks was first sold in stores in 1973, so parents that grew up with Shrinky Dinks love doing them now with their children. You can draw free hand on the plastic or you can use rubber stamps and color in the shapes, do a combination of both.

In the following pictures you can see how much fun we had with Shrinky Dinks using our Bigfoot & Pickle Face Creations clear rubber stamps. Below the girls are coloring in their designs on the plastic sheet.

When using rubber stamps with Shrinky Dinks, you must use alcohol-based permanent ink stamp pad and Shrinky Dinks recommends Stazon Inks because they have been tested. We colored in with permanent colored markers to get the look we wanted. Note: since many of the projects I do are for young kids, when doing this project the adult should stamp the image on to the paper and then advise the child the importance of not coloring on themselves or any other surface with the permanent markers. I informed the girls that they were using "big" girl markers and needed to only color on the plastic. They thought it was cool they could use markers they don't normally have access to. Here was our results. The girls wanted to go off and play so into the oven the pieces went.

Put them in the oven for 3 minutes and look at the results.

Now they stopped playing to make some bracelets with the Shrinky Dinks.

Warning: don't forget about the 21 month old! I turned my back for about 3 minutes and here he wiped the child safe/washable ink pad all over his face. He wanted to work with us but I restricted him to the washable inks, as you can see he is ruthless.

Here are some better photos of the steps. Here I stamped the images and let them dry. Be careful as the ink will slip a bit on the plastic creating some ink smudges.

Colored the images with permanent markers. The image is flipped because I wanted to try the coloring on the opposite side as the instructions were not really clear where to color. If we colored on the same side as the stamped image it seems to smear the black stamped image with the markers.

Into the oven and here is the results. Shrinky Dinks shrink to approximately 1/3rd of their original size and become 9 times thinker-per the website at http://www.shrinkydinks.com/. The images are real transparent and colorful when not laying on the brown paper.

This was such a fun project to do with my daughter and her friend and took me back to my childhood and made me realize that you don't have to do much to have fun. Use Shrinky Dinks as embellishments to your homemade cards, bookmarks or to use accents at your kids parties.

Kids crafts are so much fun and what a great way to use your clear rubber stamps. To purchase our product go to our storefront or check us out on Amazon. Never stop smiling and having fun. Happy Stamping!