Gold Butterfly Necklace & How to Cut Shrinky Dinks with Silhouette Cameo

One of my grandmothers loves butterflies and gold, so I thought it would be fun to try to make her a necklace. Even though Shrinky Dinks & Shrink Plastic is not a supported medium for Silhouette machines to cut, I wanted to give it a try. After searching through message boards, I settled on the following settings for Silhouette Cameo to cut through, although this was a partial cut and required a bit of cut work to get it to come out completely. It also is best not to pick something too intricate since when it shrinks it can break, as you can see on the bottom part of the butterfly.

Settings for Cutting Shrinky Dinks / Shrink Plastic with Silhouette Cameo

• Must use a new dedicated blade just for Shrink Plastic
• Blade Depth of 10
• Speed of 1
• Thickness of 33
• Double Cut (sometimes I cut twice for a total of quadruple cut)
• Image cut about twice as big as desired final size

Once the shrink plastic sheet is cut out, I placed it on a silicone baking mat and topped it with parchment paper and put it into the toaster oven for a few minutes at the temperature recommended by the manufacturer. Once it had shrinked to the final size, I took it out and let it cool. Then I painted it with acrylic gold paint and coated it with acrylic spray. To finish it up, all I did was cut some chain and add the jump rings.

Products Used: