Tag Archives: plastic

Tutorial- Customised Plastic Tags

These are tags I made for Sarah at Fripperies and Bibelots, however I’ve decided not to make these for sale anymore so I may as well pass on how I make them in case you want them for jewellery, maybe cards or even little zip pulls…

YOU WILL NEED
Printable shrink plastic
Printer and computer
Scissors or a punch in the shape you want
Hole punch
Oven
Scrap paper
Double sided tape
Clear varnish spray

1) Make your layout on the computer. I use Photoshop and make a grid to put the text into. For little biddy sized ones for jewellery tags, I make a 1″ square grid, you can make rows of text instead or change your grid to fit different shapes. If you are using a punch, make the grid fit the shape. Bear in mind that the colours will darken so print colours a bit lighter and things will shrink A LOT. I can get 50-60 tags from one sheet. Most sheets of shrink plastic for printing are US Letter Size, so make sure your document is set up for that too.

2) Now print it! Leave to dry for a minute of two.

3) Punch out your shapes from your sheet or cut out with scissors. Please note if you’re not doing circles that sharp corners will stay sharp when finished and mean a lot of effort sanding them down. You may prefer to do that or you might prefer to round your corners off. To use the punch, take off the bit that collects the punched out bits and use upside down so you can get your positioning right.

4)  Take off the bit catcher from the hole punch and use upside down in the same way to the first punch to make holes in the tops of your tags. Try to leave at least 2mm from the top or the holes may tear when strinking.

5) Preheat your oven to 150 degrees C.

6) Layout the shapes on a clean baking tray so that they don’t overlap.

7) Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for about 2-3 minutes. They will shrivel up and then lay flat again. If you overcook they will go a bit yellow so it’s worth keeping your eye on them. Also please don’t be offended by my dirty oven! The ones at the back seem to bake a bit slower so keep your eyes on those. Just before you take the tray out of the oven , you can use a spoon to push them down and flatten them out if you need to.

8) They will cool pretty fast, so after a minute or two you can start sticking them to a piece of scrap paper ready for varnishing. Use the most low tack double sided tape you can, repositionable tape would be excellent if there is such a thing. The power of the propellant in the varnish spray will blow all your tags away if you don’t stick them down. However if you prefer a gloss finish and you want to nail varnish them instead, you won’t need to do this bit.

9) Spray with varnish outside, assuming it isn’t raining out there. I use car lacquer spray from Halfords for mine. Let dry and spray again. Once dry, peel off the sheet straight away to avoid stickiness from the tape staying on the back.

Ta da! Attached to whatever you want with string, jump rings, etc, etc….

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Spotlight on… Recycloanalyst

It’s been a while since a feature wasn’t just all about me, me, me! I found this small, little discovered shop- also from the UK- on Etsy this morning. All of the jewellery is created from old broken jewellery and here are some of my favourites…

Click here for Recycloanalyst’s shop

PRESS RELEASE: New Bezels for Resin Exclusively at PennyDog

A range of acrylic bezels- specifically for resin jewellery- now available

PennyDog continues to pioneer contemporary resin crafting in the UK with the introduction of specially designed acrylic jewellery bezels. The initial range features heart and star pendants and square bracelet feature blanks, all with a generous 5mm depth for embedding all sorts of goodies. Uniquely, they also come with a template for cutting fabric and paper to fit inside, making the process so simple and ideal for beginners.

Currently available in black, there are plans for white bezel bangles and circle pendants for late summer. The bezels are laser cut from sturdy acrylic in two sections, then pieced together by hand. Priced at just £2.20 for a pendant, they make creating professional results affordable.

All customers that purchase a bezel can enter their finished creations into a pool on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/groups/pennydogbezelcomp/) to be in with a chance of winning a bracelet bezel set and two further bezels of their choice! The closing date is November 1st 2010, so why not get making this summer?

Bezels and other resin supplies, as well as finished jewellery pieces are available at www.penny-dog.co.uk .

PennyDog exclusive resin bezels!

Coming very soon are these new bezels for resin jewellery! I designed them and then had them prduced in black acrylic, with white versions expected a little later this year depending on how well received these are! They are 5mm deep, so brilliant for embedding more than just fabric and paper.

You also get a template with each one so you can accurately cut paper to go inside, simply draw around the shape and cut just inside of the line.

They are laser cut and then I assemble them by hand. Leave me a comment if there’s a particular shape you would like to see made and it might just happen!

This little square is 1.5cm wide, I plan to sell these as a bracelet kit with 5 pieces, a toggle clasp and jump rings for £7.20, or individual pieces for £1.50 each.

These stars and hearts are 2 inches wide and make very cute pendants. I plan to sell these for £2.20 each.

I only received these samples today and I was so impatient that I didn’t seal the paper in these properly and the glue probably wasn’t completely dry so it went white, so please excuse the rubbishness of these examples and pretend they are really good 😉

Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got, I’m still Penny from the block…

I’ve recently been making faux gemstones and plan to make these in all of the birthstones! originally they were made with drill in bails:

but now they have these new stick on ones, making them much neater and giving a cleaner finish!:

The bails if you want to use them for your own jewellery come in packs of 10 for 50p in the PennyDog shop, and the “Diamond” earrings and pendant will be added to the “Sparkle” category a little later today!

Spotlight on… Una Odd

I love this beautiful acrylic jewellery from Una Odd and the combination of a synthetic material with natural patterns. Here’s some of my favourites…

Blogumentary: Cody’s Steampunk Earplugs Part 2 and a few other things…

Today I got on with the business of making the mould for the resin pugs I am making for Cody…

I superglued the model into the lid of a little tub to stop it from falling over…

I mixed the silicone in the main part of the pot…

I then popped the lid back on and tuned the pot upside down to allow the silicone to run around the model. The cup is for a bit of stability as the lid was slightly domed!

Also this morning before I went to work, I baked some tags for a customer. They are ready for sealing, just need to print a few more disks and her order is complete!

And on the subject of plastic tags (kind of), last night I bought the February edition of Crafts Beautiful from ASDA as my article on printed shrink plastic is in it, page 50-51! Check it out 😉

Product Review: Soop rings!

 

So I got some of those lovely animal rings from http://soop.etsy.com that I featured on my blog earlier, a cow and a little goat. They come in various sizes to fit everyone and are perfectly made from translucent acrylics. They feel comfortable to wear although I do find the horns on the goat are a little realistic and can get caught on things! Luckily I layer them (as pictured) so the cow protects his friend from causing any real damage. They come in different forest and farmyard favourites, as well as toadstools and trees being available for extra layering effect. You could create a whole scene on your fingers! Priced at $12 individually, or $50 or $80 per complete set of the forest or farmyard range respectively. Great, unusual gifts for the young and the young at heart, and the fact that they are made from one piece of material means that they will no doubt last a long long time.

Spotlight on… Soop

I’ve seen these rings before, but never realised that you could build a whole landscape on your finger, and that they are based in the UK too! All of the rings are cut from acrylic, one of my favourite mediums 🙂 http://soop.etsy.com

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New acrylic and resin range

I am currently working on a new range involving cutting shapes from acrylic and embedding metal leaf and dyes into the middle of the piece with resin as a plique-a-jour effect. Here’s the first prototype for a peace dove. I need to work on the join, but it’s pretty good.

Acrylic was cut out with a saw, using a sketch stuck on firmly with magic tape as a guide. Edges were filed and holes were drilled…

Join filled with epoxy resin, then heart shape filled with polyester resin and silver leaf mix…

Attached to necklace. I also added a coat of acrylic spray to seal the resin…