How to Make Shrinky Dink Earrings for Halloween

Show up for the Halloween parties this year, sporting these fun and spooky DIY earrings.

They are easy to make by tracing a pattern onto shrink plastic (shrinky dinks), plus you'll be the talk of the party because of how original they are.

Find some Halloween vector graphics online that you want your earrings to look like. Vector graphics have clear cut lines and perfect for this type of project.

I just did an image search of "halloween graphics" in google and I got the results I wanted.

Copy the graphics into a program that lets you resize them for printing. This is something that word can do.

I used an iPad app called good notes. It's my absolute favorite notebook app.

Like you can see in the image above, you want the graphics to print out at around 3 inches or roughly twice the size you want your earrings to be. Shrink plastic reduces the size by half.

Print out the images.

The shrink plastic will be smooth when you take it out of the package. But a lot of coloring methods won't stick to smooth plastic. So you'll need to use some sand paper to make one side rough.

This is how mine looked when I was done:

Place your scratched shrink plastic over your printed graphics with the sanded side up.

Trace the lines of your graphic with a black sharpie.

I used a bigger sharpie to fill in the black spaces.

Cut out your image, leaving a little room outside the lines.

But make sure you leave a bump at the top big enough for a standard hole punch to punch a hole.

Punch a hole in the space given.

Use chalk stamp ink and something like an eyeshadow applicator to color in your graphic.

You can also use colored pencils if you don't have the chalk ink.

I have several colors of the chalk ink so I tried to do some blending of the colors to make them look like the original graphics.

Now the fun part.

Use a heat gun or your oven to shrink the plastic. If using your oven, follow the heating instructions that came on the shrink plastic.

It's actually a little easier to use your oven plus the plastic comes out a little more uniform. But heat guns can also do the job.

I used my heat gun because I love to watch the plastic shrink. I also used a grate on top hoping it would keep the plastic from blowing around too much. It didn't work all that well.

Also, when you use a heat gun, have a spatula ready to press the plastic if it curls in the corners.

Here are my two sets of earrings after heating:

Coat the inked sides with gloss glaze. Mod Podge should work just fine as long as you don't get them wet.

Attach a jump ring and earring hook to the hole you punched.

And voila!

Now you have some custom Halloween earrings that everyone will love.

If you need to decorate your front door for Halloween, check out my spider and spiderweb magnet tutorials.