Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Shrink art butterfly

Hi everyone! This week is my week to post a tutorial and I have a new found "obsession", shrink art embellishments! I have one on my card below and have made another one to show you step by step. I have found free printable images online for my butterflies.

The first thing you need is Shrink art plastic, the one I prefer is the one for inkjet printers but it also comes in sheets you can stamp and color on.

Then I print out my images onto a sheet.


Then cut out your image.


Now comes the fun part! You can either put the image into your oven and bake it or or heat it up with an embossing tool. It shrinks up really fast, within 20 seconds or so but it gets HOT! so be careful. I do hold mine down with a metal pokey tool very gently because it can poke a hole in the material. It will also fold over onto itself but normally will flatten back out, if not, just pull it open while warm. Sometimes I will take an acrylic stamping block and smush it down to flatten it but sometimes I let it cool just a bit and hold the wings up on the sides to give it some dimension.

Here is a comparison of one just cut out and one heated.


And here is one on my finished card.

Have fun!

5 comments:

Pat said...

Oh Amanda!! I didn't realize these were made with shrink stuff!! Fabulous!! I am sooooo going to try this!! Thanks for the great tutorial!! You rock, sistah!! Hugs. Pat

Julie said...

Great Tutorial and gorgeous flutterbys!

Tracy said...

Used to play with this stuff all the time when I was a kid. The detail you get from those printed images is just awesome. Might have to pick up a pack of this to play with if I ever get a decent color printer. Great tute Amanda. Hugs!

Maria@Crafty Cre8tions said...

I have shrinky stuff here! I should use some! I don't think I ever thought of printing images off computer - I just stamped my images on stuff and colored, then shrunk it!
This opens up to a lot more possibiities!!!

Patty Sue 2 said...

I will have to give this a try. It looks like fun and makes beautiful embellishments.