Those of you who are old enough may remember commercials for a product called "Shrinky Dinks." Basically, they were plastic you could draw pictures on and then bake the oven which would cause the plastic to shrink up. Interestingly, although the commercials are long gone, the product still exists. I found it on-line at yes, you guessed it, http://www.shrinkydinks.com. According to their Web site, the kits of years past were manufactured by the major toy companies of the time, such as Milton Bradley, Colorforms, Western Publishing, Skyline Toys and others. Those kits are no longer being produced but you can get the current incarnation at craft stores. However, the old Shrinky Dinks don’t work with computer printers.
Enter Avery (http://www.avery.com), the maker of many label products. On a trip to an office supply store, I found the computer equivalent of Shrinky Dinks, which does work with your ink jet printer. Since I’m sort of an office supply junkie, I had to try them out. The aptly named "White Printable Shrink Sets" let you create your own crafts using your ink jet printer.
Of course, since this article was written, Avery discontinued their version of the shrinky stuff. But at some point in the last few years, Shrinky Dinks came to the rescue. If you go to their site ( http://www.shrinkydinks.com). and search for Item D600-6A, you’ll find their inkjet version of shrinky plastic. (Although I didn’t use it for my clock way back when, the folks at Shrinky Dinks contacted me to let me know it exists.)
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of instructions for making clocks out of old CDs. The problem for me has always been the clock face. I never saw a good method of covering up the hole in the CD that looks nice. On my clock, I wanted only the holographic shiny part to be visible, not the ugly clear part. (Yes, I know, I’m picky.)
So when I saw the Avery plastics, I knew I had found the answer to my problem. I created artwork in Corel Draw that looked like this.
You may be wondering why I didn’t just make the clock faces circular. The reason is because cutting the plastic stuff is rather difficult because it’s thick. Even with sharp scissors, cutting out curves is challenging. (The cover of the package has curvy flower key chains cut out and I can tell you that they didn’t cut them out using the scissors in the picture!)
I avoided the whole issue by making the clock faces square. Oddly enough, the instructions say to avoid square corners, but I didn’t have any problems with them. I also needed to make sure that I cut a hole in the center for the clock mechanism to go through. You need to do all your cutting after printing, but before baking.
The trick to using the plastic is to make your artwork large enough to accommodate the fact that it shrinks a lot. The designs shrink down more than 50% their original size. For example, the artwork for my clock faces is 3.8 inches wide and it shrank down to 1.8.
After you have your artwork set up you print it out using the "best quality" settings on your inkjet printer. You also should print them using a straight paper path (on my HP printer, that means using the rear media feed).
After you have your artwork printed out, you let the ink dry and go find a cookie sheet and preheat your oven to 350 degrees. You do not want to use glass, insulated, or air bake cookie sheets. So you need to find one of the old grody ones you have hiding way in the back of your cabinet. Then place your various artwork at least 1 inch apart from each other so they don’t touch each other
You then bake your artwork on the middle rack of the oven for only two minutes (i.e., don’t wander off and feed the dog or they’ll fry). The now much smaller plastic artifacts have a tendency to want to curl up, however you can stop them by placing an oven mitt and a heavy baking dish on top of them while they cool. (I used the lasagna pan, which is made of Pyrex glass.)
After I had my clock faces, it was easy to put them together with the clock mechanism and an old CD to turn it into a clock. And yes, it still works!
The Finished CD Clock