Genevieve over at SEWphisticate has an awesome tutorial on turning plastic take out containers or cups into shrinky dinks! It turns out that #6 plastic, a type that many cities do not recycle, will shrink beautifully in the oven! For her first attempts, she cut the plastic into shapes and punched holes to make shrunken pendants. She said these shapes turned out pretty distorted. After some experimentation and fine-tuning, she came up with a method for turning out lovely plastic rings, like the ones above! I think they’d made really cool earrings or maybe you could wire them together into a mobile? To achieve the effect, she first cut the cups horizontally to create 1 1/4″ tall, skinny rings. She stuck those into the oven at 325°F on a piece of parchment until they had melted down to form rigid, thick circles of plastic. Genevieve is a seamstress, a jeweler, and the mastermind behind SEWphisticate. You can check out her detailed tutorial full of awesome pictures over on the SEWphisticate blog!
