Sanity with Sarah: Use Stencils to Make Shrinky Dink Keychains

Day 5, and the inmates have started to plot against the warden.

In an act of self-defense, I have decided to sacrifice a couple of my stencils for the greater good.

One of the many amazing and wonderful perks of working at The Cookie Countess is that I can occasionally take home “defective” stencils that don’t pass inspection. So it turns out that I have ended up with a few duplicates over the last 6 months, which came in handy when deciding which ones were heading to the proverbial chopping block.

As a girl mom/ Girl Scout mom/ craft mom in general, I tend to have a lot of miscellaneous craft stuff in my house. So I went digging in my craft closet for ideas for something relatively simple and yet semi-time consuming for the kids to do (after all, the goal was to give them something to do for the afternoon, not for 15 minutes). When I found a package of Shrinky Dinks (where to find Shrinky Dinks, unaffiliated with The Cookie Countess) paper, I had my answer: stenciled keychains!

My 9-year-old, Sophie, was in charge of the Sharpie work, stenciling on the designs while my 3-year-old, Maddie, watched and waited impatiently.

They had a blast coloring in their designs with markers, and they even talked me into letting them use some glitter to kick things up a notch.

The verdict: 10/10 would stencil again :-)

Materials

• Shrinky Dink paper
• Markers in a bunch of colors
• Stencils (optional, if your child happens to be an artiste and wants to freehand a design. Not optional for me, who can barely draw a stick figure.)
• Scissors
• Hole punch
• Parchment-lined baking sheet
• Elmer’s glue, paint brush, and holographic embossing glitter (optional)
• Magnets (optional, but helpful)

Directions

1. Place Shrinky Dink paper on a cookie skeet, and put a stencil in place over it. Hold in place with magnets. Use a marker to trace the stencil lines onto the Shrinky Dink paper.

2. Use markers to color in the design. If you want to add glitter, dab a tiny amount of glue wherever you’d like the glitter to be, then sprinkle on top. Shake off excess back into the container.

3. Use scissors to cut the designs out, leaving a bit of space around the edge. Hole punch a keychain hole somewhere on the edge of your design, but not too close to the edge.

4. Place designs on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake at 325°F for approximately 3 minutes. The designs will curl up in the oven, but they will gradually flatten back out (mostly) towards the end of the 3 minutes. Once they are out of the oven, use a fondant smoother or something similar to press them fully flat while they are still hot.

 And that’s it!

Very easy to do, but the kids took their time to get their artwork just the way they wanted.

I was also able to get quite a few stenciled designs out of one sheet of Shrinky Dink paper.

Sophie instantly attached her new keychains to the collection on her backpack (please please please let her use it again soon), and Maddie was just happy to be like her big sister. For the moment, riot averted.

Of course, tomorrow is another day.