DIY Cameo Necklaces (made with Shrinky Dinks!)

You won’t see that many jewelry DIY’s here (not really our specialty), but we thought this was a pretty fun and easy holiday geek gift idea. DIY Shrinky Dink cameo necklaces.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when we posted this DIY Shrinky Dink necklace tutorial from Wrapped Up In Rainbows? At the time I was just going to make the same style necklace, but as Legend of Zelda rupees. Well, I did, but I’m still working on getting the color right, so that’s a post for another day. In the meantime, we made THESE.

We ended up making several necklaces, for a few different friends. This first batch was a Star Trek logo (…for me), a Batman logo, and a drawing of the Michigan State mascot (Cam’s alma mater. Trivia: He used to be the mascot). As you can see, it’s very easy to tailor these to whatever your friends interests are.

We used:
Cameo-style necklace settings and chains (get ’em at Joann or Michaels)
Shrink plastic (AKA: Shrinky Dinks)
Heavy duty glue (like E6000)

Step One: Draw your shape onto the shrink plastic. If you don’t want to freehand, you can also print the shape onto plain paper and trace it (or use your phone as a lightbox and trace directly from it! That worked for us, since the Star Trek logo is already my phone wallpaper). Make sure to draw your shape about twice the size that you want your final piece to be. For the Star Trek necklace we also made a basic black circle base out of the shrink plastic, to give more dimension, but this is optional.

Step Two: Color! Permanent markers will give a saturated color, or use colored pencils for a more subtle shade. The color will intensify once you bake the shrink plastic. You can also buy pre-colored shrink plastic (which is what the Star Trek logo is made of).

Step Three: Cut ’em out! Ours looked like this:

Step Four: Bake your plastic, according to the package instructions. Very quick and fun-to-watch process. It takes about 1 minute.

Step Five: Glue your shapes into your necklace setting. For the Michigan State and Batman cameo’s, we also painted the settings with acrylic gloss paint before gluing.

And that’s it! Make necklaces for sports teams, TV show logos, band logos, favorite shapes (music note, stars, emoticons, etc)… whatever.

This was our first time playing with Shrinky Dinks since we were kids, and it was surprisingly fun/funny. We ended up going through at least five or 6 sheets of it, just messing around (we now have tiny versions of Frankenstein’s monster, Cobra Commander, terrible self-portraits, and our D&D characters. Wheeeeee).