I am soooo excited! We finally discovered Shrinky Dinks. Apparently these existed even when I was little but back then we just drank out of the hose and played with sticks and rocks so I’m just discovering them now. Today, we made our own charm bracelets!
At first, the idea for making charm bracelets came as I was searching the web for simple (these always turn into more complex the more and more I overthink about them :-p) ideas on a craft to do with the girls at the Girl Scout meeting that I was supposed to lead. Since I’m the cookie mom for one of my girl’s, I led a meeting in which we made cookie charm bracelets which I’ll have some pictures of here.
The original posting that I found was to use yarn as the bracelet, but we found these endless chains at Wal-mart for cheap and since my husband is handy, I enlisted his help to make the bracelet chains. 🙂 He’s the best! :-p Somehow, whenever we do a craft, he ends up being the craft adviser and then eventually a full-time helper b/c I need it and so I don’t end up giving up and spending all our money on Etsy for pre-made stuff. :-p In that sense, I guess there’s something in it for him too.
Here’s a picture of the bracelet we made at the girl scout meeting:
That was before we discovered Shrinky Dinks. Heres one of the shrinky dink bracelets.
Here’s a step by step on how we made our own charm bracelet after discovering Shrinky Dinks. It also applies to how we made the Girl Scout cookie bracelet as well.
Step 1: Make several trips to Wal-mart over a period of several months. In fact, just camp out there. Kidding. I’m hoping to save you some trips there if I can. But sometimes I feel like my entire life is a series of Wal-mart trips so if anyone can relate – I feel you.
Here’s what you’ll need:
-Chain (You can find this in the jewelry section at Wal-mart)
-Lobster claws
-Small rings to attach the charms to the lobster claws
-For the girl scout bracelet, I bought those key chain labels that you see above and I printed out pictures of girl scout cookies that I found on the internet. I pasted the pictures in Word and shrunk them down to the size I needed to fit on the key chain label. I actually printed them on full-size sticker sheets that I found on Amazon (or you could just glue them on). I had the girls write the names of the cookies on the back and attach them to the bracelet.
-For Shrinky Dinks, I bought Shrinky Dinks plastic on Amazon – it’s the Frosted Ruff N’ Ready Creative pack.
-I also bought a variety pack of different colored fine point permanent markers from Amazon.
-Standard sized hole punch to punch a hole in the charms
-I also used the tools that you’ll see in the following pictures from my husband’s toolbox. I don’t know what they are called though so I’ll just leave it at that.
Step 2: Measure your child’s wrist and make the bracelet bigger than that. You can’t make it too big b/c you will be able to adjust it later if you need to. Use the tools below in order to pry open the link in the chain and remove the portion of the chain that you want to use for the bracelet.
Step 3: Put the lobster claw on the end of the bracelet (the link that you pried open)
Step 4: Close the link back together by pinching it with the following tool
Woolah! Your bracelet is now ready and all you need to do is make the charms to put on it! Or if you are already kaput by this time, they have a nice shiny silver bracelet and you can call it a day. :-p Just kidding – now comes the fun part – don’t give up before the fun part!
Step 5: Time to make the charms – this is where the kids get to have some fun! I printed some pictures off the internet for them to trace to begin with. We put them under the plastic sheets and they traced and colored in with the permanent markers. Then once they started to get the hang of it, they began to draw pictures from scratch. They all turned out sooo cute!
Remember to have the kids draw pictures three times the size they want the charm – they will shrink down to 1/3 the original size. Then pop them in the oven. We used a toaster oven at 325 for 1 to 3 minutes. As soon as they laid mostly flat, we took them out. If they were still slightly curled, we flattened them with a spatula but they were mostly flat.
Step 6: Make sure to put a hole in each picture using a standard size hole punch – these will shrink to the perfect size for a charm bracelet charm.
This is the alarming part – they start to curl up and the kids start to freak out and think they are getting destroyed but just wait for the magic to happen..
Step 7: Use these little silver rings to put on the charms. You can pry them open with a screw driver instead of using your thumb nail like I did – that isn’t fun.
Now for more pictures:
