Shrinky dinks and the Cricut mini die cutter

Sometimes you have a need to make a craft as a reward or prize for an activity -- and not go crazy in the process.  In my case, I needed to make some small charms for a party.  While shrinky-dinks were a good choice for the materials, what I did NOT want to do is go crazy cutting out the same shape again and again.  In an effort to be very clever about the whole thing (and, being logical, of course) I decided to use my Cricut mini die cutting machine and Shrinky Dinks, but the problem was that there weren't a lot of sites with instructions on how to do something like this (there may be YouTube videos on it, but honestly, guys, I can read instructions faster and skip to the basics.  The last thing I want is to sit through 5 minutes of a video of music and chat.)

So I decided I'd just have to figure out how to do it myself.  The material isn't that hard to cut.  What could possibly go wrong?

Happily, the answer is "not a whole lot."

I picked a photo that I'd taken, cropped and shrank it and played with the color enhancement in Gimp (you can use any photo editing software you like.)  I picked a final size and made sure the image would look fine with a white border (because I hate wasting ink colors.)  I saved that picture and then brought it into Microsoft Word (you can do this with any word processor) and simply repeated the picture in even rows and columns.

I knew I wanted the end "charm" to be about an inch high, so my image was two inches high.  Once I was happy with the setup, I printed the sheet out on plain paper.  Then came the issue of trying to set up the cut marks for my Cricut mini.  I placed the plain sheet of paper on my cutting mat, eyeballed where I thought the cuts should go, and cut a scrap piece of paper (not the one I had printed.) 

Then I pulled off the cutouts and held the sheet to the printed paper to see if the holes would make a perfect border around the images.  It took about an hour of printing, cutting, and tweaking but I finally got the thing to work.

I first printed out the patterns on a sheet of Shrinky-Dink for ink jet printers. 

Next, I prepped the Cricut's cutting mats (which were not new mats) by running a strip of Dryline adhesive on the edges where I was going to put the Shrinky-Dink paper -- because if the paper shifted at all during the cutting, I would have ruined the whole thing.

I used my regular blade in the Cricut Mini, setting the blade depth to 6 and the pressure to 5.  In the Cricut Craft Room, I set the cutting speed to 3 (medium) and the number of cuts to 2 and rubbed the paper hard on the mat for luck and told Cricut Craft Room to process the cut.

I was happy with the results.  The charms shrank properly in the oven and I saved both the Cricut cutting shapes and the document with the images in case I needed to run another set of them.  It was a lot of trouble to set up, but in the end, using the Cricut let me do twenty of the charms with less stress and hassle than if I'd tried to cut the things out by hand.