Remember Shrinky Dinks from when you were a kid? I fondly remember the box of Smurf ones that I had. It was so much fun watching them curl up in the oven and I always worried that they wouldn’t lie flat. But, through some plastic miracle, they always did! I thought it would be fun to bring some of this magic to my daughter so I decided that we would make some of our own Shrinky Dinks for Christmas.

First, I bought my Shrinky Dinks paper. You can buy kits for making all sorts of themed items, you can buy film you can print on and you can even buy Christmas Shrinky Dinks but I went with the plain Shrinky Dink paper. Then, I went and found some free coloring book Christmas images to print out. You can pretty much use anything you want. I find that the coloring book images are easy to trace and easy for my daughter to color. I didn’t have an actual Christmas coloring book on hand yet so I went with what I could find online.

Next, I traced the image with a black Sharpie onto the shiny side of the Shrinky Dink paper (Fig.1). It’s helpful to tape the paper to the coloring page so you don’t actually move your image around while you are tracing. Next, my daughter and I colored all of the images (Fig.2). I used acrylic markers to do the North Pole one pictured in Figure 2 and my daughter used colored pencils to do the other ones. You can also use acrylic paints but I wasn’t up for that much of a mess.

Now, you are ready to cut your images out for baking. I found out with Rudolph that it is better to cut around any fine details in your image so that you don’t have small parts that will wrinkle up too much and stick to the main picture when you bake them. If you just round out the image like I did with the North Pole, you don’t have to be quite as careful when baking. Otherwise, keep an eye on them and use a bamboo skewer to detach the image from itself if it starts to stick. The last step before baking is adding the hole if you want to be able to hang your designs from the tree. I used a standard hole punch on ours.  Follow the directions included with your Shrinky Dink plastic for baking times, temperature and tips.

I am always amazed at just how much they shrink! I used a ruler in the before and after pictures to show you the size difference. It went from almost 9 inches to about 3 1/2 inches (Fig.3)! This gave us the perfect size ornament though to hang on the little tree that will go in my daughter’s room. She was so excited to go ahead and put them on her tree so I could take a picture (Fig.4).

Shrinky Dinks are now a huge hit in our house so I am certain we will be making many more to fill this tiny tree. I think I would even like to try making a garland for it by doing lots of stars or another simple shape and then stringing them together.