How-To Shrink Plastic Buttons

I was so excited when I found this fantastic tutorial on Pinterest about making your own Shrinky Dink buttons. I followed her advice and bought this circle punch from Fiskars and these pens which she swears means you can wash the buttons afterwards. I was a happy camper when my punch arrived yesterday and I put everything aside to play with my new toys!

What you will need:
A heat embossing gun/or a regular oven
Single paper punch
Shrinky Dinks/Shrinkles
Millenium Zig Pens
Piskars Circle Punch

Firstly I traced out the circle shapes into a notebook and drew out some designs. I wasn't really trying too hard, I'll probably work on more designs later, I just did a few things that popped into my mind.

I used my new Fiskars punch to cut out some circles, you should get 3 per small sheet of shrink plastic. I then traced over my pencil drawings.

I used my punch to make a card template as a guide for where the central holes should go, so that they are the same on each button. I got the central point and measured 2mm each side of this mark. This is where I made my inner holes. Then I just placed this template over my coloured circles before using the paper punch

I placed the circle in a baking tray for when I'm shrinking it, I also had a little pva stamping block ready for when it's finished shrinking, just to flatten it down.

Here you go! These are my new Shrinky Dink buttons. I'm not 100% happy with them, some of them came out kinda dirty looking, but I think I need to clean off old colouring pencil power from my baking tray, I really like the simpler designs like the green and blue flower and the brown spiral. I'm also gonna try using my white shrink paper more with simple designs and see what works best. Eventually I'd like to sell a selection of these in my supplies shop, so before I get to that stage I want to make sure I'm totally happy with them.

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