Shrinky Dinks were first sold in a mall in Wisconsin the month and year of my birth, October of 1973. I never played with Shrinky Dinks as a child. It wasn't until adulthood and before kids that I discovered how much fun it could be to watch a drawing on plastic shrink to one third of it's original size in the oven in a 1-minute time frame. The same day that I made the teeny tiny man to go with my Archival Vertigo Spider (see #50), my 9-year-old daughter made the planet Jupiter and my 5-year-old drew a picture of her best friend, almost completely filling their 8.5 X 11 sheets of rough and ready plastic. Then we all crouched in front of the oven window to watch our pieces twist and bend until they finally flattened out again into smaller, brighter, less brittle works of art than we started with.
Later that day, I used varied colors of permanent art markers to make wavy lines on some rough and ready plastic for a marbled look. Then, I cut a circle out of the colored lines, punched holes in the top and bottom of the circle with a paper punch, and put my piece in the oven until it was about halfway through the shrinking process. When I removed it, this was the result—a warped, concave piece that I could use for the body of a spider.
Materials: Shrinky Dink plastic, square brass spacer, round amber bead, green glass bugle beads, topaz glass seed beads, sky blue E beads, mustard yellow-coated wire
