Every year for Christmas, my mom and I do a craft together (don’t judge- Christmas Crafts are the best).  One year we got a bunch of teeny MochiMochi Land patterns and spent Christmas week knitting up an army of little dudes.  Another year we broke out all of Mom’s papercrafting things and made dozens of little notebooks.

This year, Mom got a big pack of Shrinky Dinks!I love Shrinky Dinks.  They’re so easy to do, and always delightful (I use them with one of the kids’ classes I teach- they’re always a hit).

If you haven’t played with them before, Shrinky Dinks are sheets of plastic that you draw/color on/stamp/decorate, then cut out, and put in the oven.  As they bake, they get all wiggly, and when they settle down, they’ve shrunk to about half their original size.

It’s fun!  (Despite the boring way I’ve explained it.)

Anyway, this year, a pile of pristine Shrinky Dink material and a box of my mom’s fancy art pens in front of me, I tried to come up with a project that would end up being useful- after all, most things made with Shrinky Dinks are pretty silly- lots of ornaments and pendants.

Because I’m a knitter, my mind jumped to stitch markers!

I cut out a stitch marker (a circle about 2 inches in diameter, and about a quarter-inch wide, decorated it, and popped it in the toaster oven.  And would you believe, it worked!

Needless to say, I spent the rest of the afternoon manufacturing as many stitch markers as I could.

Now, they ended up a little large- the smallest one could probably fit on a US13, but I bet you could totally come up with the dimensions for tinier stitch markers.   I should probably go get some more Dink material, and start experimenting some more.  For science.  Yeah…

I’m definitely not just looking for an excuse to play with Shrinky Dinks.

Have you ever made your own stitch markers?  What did you use?