shrink plastic tags

I’ve been working on cleaning up the studio. One of my clean-up techniques involves finishing projects that I uncover- not recommended to get the clean-up done quickly!

So, I found a pile of shrink plastic that was cut into strips and I had used to make one batch of tags from. Before I finished or put my mess away, I’d gone on to something else. I finished up the tags- that is how I put my signature on my dolls, in case you were wondering- and was left with a pile of pieces, too small for tags but so obviously useful for something.

I had a mix of clear and translucent plastic. I drew a rough drawing of a girl on a piece of paper and used it as a guide. I laid each piece of plastic over the sketch and drew with a thin sharpie marker.

Time to cook them up. This is where things tend to go wrong for me. I have tried a heat gun and the oven- neither has worked very well. I preheated the oven, popped them in and watched. As usual, I was getting  ones that shrink more in one direction then another, ones that curl and won’t go flat again, ones that started turning brown before they were finished shrinking. I decided it was time to do some experimenting. I tried different places in the oven since right in the middle was not so good. First- the rack in the topmost position. Nope. Then all the way to the bottom- where we have our pizza stone. >Play Trumpets Here< It worked- perfectly! All the curled ones flattened! All the ones that shrunk horizontally more then vertically, evened out! Unfortunately the ones that had overcooked did not un-brown.

Here they are on my fingers for scale. Now I have a gaggle of girls and I really like them. But, I am not sure what to do with them. Any ideas?