Isn't half the fun of having a birthday party receiving presents from all of your friends? Especially after you've been going to their birthday parties all year and giving them presents?! It really hardly seems fair.
A few weeks ago my daughter got invited to a new schoolmate birthday party. Before we had even received the (no gifts, please) invitation, she came home from school saying that Lana wants a Dora & Friends charm bracelet because she flushed hers down the toilet.
I Google Dora charm bracelets and am appalled at how much they now cost now that Dora & Friends is apparently no longer popular. $20?! For something that I'm pretty sure my daughter had on her Amazon wishlist at one point for $5 or $8.
Then we get the invitation and I figure I'm off the hook. I don't have to spend $20 on this bracelet because the invitation says "No gifts, please." But my daughter insists that this is the only thing this girl wants and I start feeling guilty about showing up to a six-year-old's party empty-handed.
What's a mom to do? Get crafty, of course! I started thinking about how I could make charms for a Dora charm bracelet. One of my first thoughts -- my Silhouette Cameo which I have been making a concerted effort to use more because it was a pretty big investment. Plus it's just plain fun to see what I can make.
One thing I really love is print and cut. It's so...easy and awesome. If you haven't yet tried it out, put it on your to do list! I've made a bunch of basic print and cut items using card stock like embellishments for scrapbook pages and stickers for my daughter. I started wondering what other materials I could cut that would be more durable.
In an "aha!" moment I realized that some time back I had purchased shrink plastic. I used a bit of it up making charms by stamping with permanent ink, coloring, cutting out and shrinking in the toaster oven. I remembered it being less than fun to cut out. Could my Cameo cut it?
I Googled it and a few people said they had tried it, with varying success. I noted the cut settings they used and decided I would start with those. I downloaded some images of Dora and her friends and thought about how I would make this work. First I was going to cut out each character's head, but then I looked at the real bracelet and the faces were in the shape of hearts. It seemed easier to cut hearts so I made a design in Silhouette studio.
I sized the hearts to about an inch then increased the size to 300%, figuring they would shrink down to about one third of the original size. Making something into a print and cut file it really easy -- just go to the Registration Marks window and select the registration marks style appropriate for your machine. Then place your design within the registration marks. Trace your image to create your cut lines. Send the image to your regular printer. After you print it, cut it out with your Silhouette like you would normally do. The machine will read the registration marks and cut out your printed image.
My first attempt at printing the images resulted in a runny mess that didn't seem like it would ever dry. I think it was because I used high quality printing, but possibly it was the shrink plastic itself. So I tried a different brand of the shrink plastic I had on hand and printed with regular settings and it came out just fine.
Then came time to cut. I set the Silhouette to Blade 10, Speed 1, Depth 33, double cut, as recommended on several blogs I had read. As recommended, I sent it through twice, essentially cutting four times (double cut, then do not unload, just send the job again). And it just scored the plastic, not cutting all the way through. I was so disappointed!
I thought I had ruined the project but since really these were just simple hearts, I cut through the scored lines with an X-Acto knife and it worked just fine. The edges were a tiny bit rough and I probably should have sanded them but at this point I was in a bit of a hurry to finish the project before the party. I punched a hole to hang the charms with my Crop-A-Dile (in hindsight I should have not put a hole in the design in Silhouette because my punch was a little smaller than the hole so a little white showed around the edges, but it wasn't too bad).
The I went to use my Silhouette to cut some cardstock. I took out the blade to change the setting back to 4 and realized I had never changed it to 10! So probably the shrink plastic would have cut right through had I actually used the correct setting. I haven't yet had a chance to experiment but I'm almost sure that if it would score it to the extent that it did on 4, it would cut clean through on 10.
To finish the bracelet I shrank the charms them in the toaster oven according to the shrink plastic's instructions. I put a piece of white cardstock on my baking sheet to prevent and shiny spots (and because I wasn't totally convinced that the ink wouldn't rub off after melting) and a piece on top of the charms to keep them from curling too much. They came out a little convex for some reason but I thought that kind of enhanced the heart design.
I added jump rings through the holes and strung up the charms with some flower beads from Oriental Trading that I had actually bought with my daughter's Girl Scout troop in mind (there are plenty left for them!) and some large plain white seed beads. The final result:
Of course then we get to the party and the little girl's mom is like, "I don't think she even likes Dora anymore..." But the birthday girl seemed happy with the bracelet, my daughter and I didn't feel bad about going to the party empty-handed and I tried a new technique that I will definitely repeat (hopefully with little more success!) in the future.
