Zipper pulls

When I started decorating barrettes I planned to give them to my cousins' daughters for birthday presents. I wanted to give something handmade to the boys, too, but I couldn't figure out what the "boy equivalent" of barrettes would be. I finally came up with the idea of making zipper pulls. So this weekend I made three zipper pulls:

Supplies:
Shrinky Dinks plastic sheets, 1/4" hole punch, 9 mm jump rings, 1" lanyard hooks, permanent markers, clip-art images

I thought about using stamped images on card stock, but that wouldn't be very sturdy for rough-and-tumble little boys. I could laminate the paper, but that still wouldn't be great. So I decided to try Shrinky Dinks^®.

I wanted to stamp images and then color them in with permanent markers, but I don't have any kid-friendly stamps that are large enough (they do shrink quite a bit). So instead I used pre-made images. I looked through some clip-art images on my computer, found a few I liked, then enlarged and printed them. I placed each image behind the Shrinky Dinks plastic and used permanent markers to trace the outlines and color in the images. I punched holes slightly above the images, cut them out and shrank them according to the directions on the Shrinky Dinks package. Once they were cool, I added a jump ring through the hole on each piece and attached a lanyard hook to the jump ring. Done!

These were easy to make -- and, even as an adult, I still thought it was fun to watch them shrink! You could create just about any kind of zipper pull, as long as you have an image to trace (or draw, if you're more talented than me). Thanks for stopping by!