We're doing 2 different crafts for Aiden's 3rd birthday party next Friday: tiki or flower shrinky-dink necklaces and sand art palm tree people. Each project requires a bit of prep and a few different steps so I'm working on setting up as much as I can ahead of time to save on mass chaos during the party.


Aiden and I tested out the necklace design and construction. I think they turned out pretty well. Here are the steps:

1. Buy the shrinky dink paper that can go through an ink jet printer (not laser). It's important to know what kind of printer you have. I, for instance, had to borrow my neighbor's for printing since ours is laser.

2. I searched for on the internet for "black and white image of" or "coloring page of" for both tiki man and hibiscus flower. I found 2 great pictures, saved them, and pasted them into a Microsoft Word doc (the shrinky dink paper size is 8X10 so you need to adjust the page layout in Word).

3. It's hard to estimate how big to make the original images. The paper shrinks to 1/3rd it's original size so I did a couple tests. I ended up with the following -

tiki men: started 1.5 x 3 inches, ended up at: .5 x 1.25

flowers: started at roughly 2x2 and ended at a little under 1x1



4. This paper is not designed to be colored on, but markers do just fine. Even if the coloring doesn't look that great on the original, by the time they shrink, the streaks mesh together and the colors intensify. For the tiki men, there are a lot of intricate details so lighter colors like orange and yellow are better than darker ones like brown. By the time they shrink, brown would probably cover up the actual design.

5. After coloring, cut out the image and punch a hole near the top where the shrinky-charm will hang from the necklace

6. Bake according to instructions. When the pieces come out, coat each with a little clear nail polish. I noticed that the color on our was coming off on my fingers even hours after they cooled off.

7. Add a jump ring (a small circular piece of wire that you can purchase by the dozens from any craft store) to the top of the charm. This makes the charm hang forward instead of sideways on the necklace
8. I bought a ton of wooden beads for next to nothing, a few packages of black necklace cord (make sure the openings in the beads are big enough to fit onto the cord), and a bunch of fasteners. I pre cut 20+ super long pieces of cord and attached one end of the fasteners to them. (in this picture, both sides of the string are tied to the fastener, but before construction, you would only tie one side so that the beads can be slipped on to the other.)

The kids can take one of the pre-assembled strings and just add the beads and charms. When they are done, I'll tie the other side of the necklace onto the fastener, trim the excess and away they go!

The second project is sand-art palm tree people. Super easy!