What is Your Favorite Wearable Art?

Hi Friends :) 

I love jewelry! I admit it. Sparkly things on my hands, wrists, ears and neck just make me happy. Even a toe ring, and anklet, a nose ring. All are awesome. I also like to play around with making my own jewelry to wear. Today for my StencilGirl Creative Team® project I made earrings using stenciled shrink plastic. So why use shrink plastic? Well, I wanted to make something small and the stencil designs were too big...so I stenciled them and then shrunk them smaller!

To begin I selected some white and some clear shrink plastic and made a measuring tool from each color. Why did I do this? I had some bezels and I wanted to make sure that my shrunken plastic would fit into the bezel. I cut a strip of each plastic and then made it into a ruler by making marks with a pen. Then I shrank the plastic and used my new 'shrunken ruler' to measure the size of the bezels. Now I can know what size to cut my plastic. 

Another consideration is what type of product to use for coloring my plastic. I decided to try some pigment ink and some archival dye based ink. Both worked great but something to think about is that when you shrink down the plastic the color will intensify and become darker. So be sure to use light colors to start out like these small pigment ink pads.

I used a heat tool that is commonly used for embossing with powders to shrink my pieces. You would probably get a more consistent result with an oven. I also used an acrylic block to flatten my pieces while they were hot.

I had a little fun adding some 'sparkle' with some Marabu alcohol ink in the color Rainbow. It is clear with some sort of a shimmery glitter in it. Very nice! I added it to the back side of the clear plastic so it would shine through before I glued them into the bezels.

To finish off my earrings I used dimensional glue over the top to create a clear shiny dome effect.You could also use resin. I used the same product to glue the plastic into the bezels.

If you would like to watch the process of making these 3 different sets of earrings with a voice over to talk you through it...here is a link to my video for StencilGirl Creative Team® November 2020.

Thank you for visiting my blog! <3 Shel C