Sunday 15 March 2009

More friendly plastic

Hmmmmn. I am starting to like this stuff. I have been playing a little with ways to use it other than in moulds. Here are some early examples.

1. Friendly Plastic heated with a heat gun (on a craft sheet) until shiny and soft. Lay some punchinella on top, push from behind the craft sheet (use a cloth to protect your fingers) to extrude Friendly Plastic through the punchinella. Picture shows small hole, medium hole and starry hole punchinella.


2. Friendly Plastic, heated with a heat gun on a craft sheet and stamped into - I used a texture stamp, inked up with versamark, and held it down - pressing quite hard - until the FP had cooled some. Leave till completely cold and peel off stamp. In the 2 samples below, I have added Treasure Gold to the left hand half of each sample to bring out the pattern.


3. Stamping into the Friendly Plastic like this leaves you with very thin FP - about 1-2 millimetres or 1/16th of an inch or thereabouts. So I thought it might die cut - I ran some pieces through my Wizard with Cuttlebug dies, and it worked reasonably well. If I stamp harder to make the pieces thinner, and use a sheet of paper or very thin card as an extra shim, I think it will work even better (I had to cut these with scissors in places to get the die cut pieces out).



4. Getting more ambitious. I cut some thin strips of Friendly Plastic and laid them all next to each other on the craft mat, then heated until they all went shiny and soft and stuck to each other. While it was all still hot, I pushed a circle cutter into the Friendly Plastic, then left it to cool. Once cool, I took the cutter and circle out. I took two other colours of Friendly Plastic, heated them, and used the cutter again. Once cool, I had 3 circles and 3 'backgrounds'. I wish I'd taken a pic at this point because they were very pretty. Anyway, I put the circles in the other colours of FP, then re-heated to join them together. And then I spoilt them by stamping into them! They were definitely prettier before I did that. However, this is what I ended up with, I think they can be reheated and used in moulds, or maybe I can cut shapes from them to make pendants.

No doubt I'll play some more today, and share the results later! The only thing I don't like is the waiting for it to cool bit - for some things you can drop it into cold water and cool/set it instantly, but not when it's on a large craft mat. Maybe I'll cut my craft mat into small pieces, so I can just drop each small piece into water as I work. It would certainly speed things up!

3 comments:

  1. Glad to see your experiments. I am intrigued by some of the things I've seen recently so I am eager to play too. Will just have to find my friendly plastic lol.

    Fiona

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  2. I'm thinkin' if you coated those last bits with some Glossy Accents or something similar they would look like interesting art glass cabachons...

    I am totally out of Friendly Plastic. Must remedy this...

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  3. These are all turning out to be rather gorgeous - the letters especially look like molten metal. Great experiments (I have always been rather scared of the stuff, so am reading with great interest). Way to go!

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