Shrink plastic book

I recently received a box of products from the people over at Grafix Arts and in the box was a package of this:

Shrink plastic!    I got it in my head that I wanted to make a book with it so I prepped a couple of sheets for shrinking.  The first thing I did was to rough up the surface of the shrink plastic with some sandpaper and then I painted it:

I used a full sheet (8 1/2″x 11″) and I painted it with a layer of Lumiere Metallic Rust.  I rubbed the paintbrush over the surface and then waited a minute and rubbed off the excess with a paper towel.  Then I added a layer of Lumiere Metallic Bronze on top and did the same thing rubbing off the excess with a paper towel.  I did this to both sides and then when the sheet was dry I used a hole punch to punch holes about an 1″apart along the long edge.  You have to poke the holes in the sheet before you shrink it otherwise if you try to do it after it’s shrunk the plastic cracks.

I shrunk the plastic between two pieces of parchment paper –you definitely want to put a piece of parchment paper on top of the plastic while it’s shrinking because it helps to keep the plastic from curling back and sticking to itself during shrinking.  The full size sheets shrunk from 8 1/2″x 11″to 3 1/2″x 5″!   Once the sheets were shrunk I used them to create a coptic stitch book:

a close up:

I remember having fun playing with shrink plastic when I was a kid and it’s still fun to play with!