Melting Plastic Bags

I came across a crafting challenge yesterday on Craftster.com. The challenge, here, inspired me with a few ideas, one of which calls for using old plastic bags.

I've heard about melting plastic bags down into a solid sheet that you can use for....whatever...but I'd never tried it before.

So, my sister-in-law, Theresa, came over yesterday and we tried it out. After a couple of misfit sheets we figured out the trick that worked for us: iron setting at 3.5-4, vigorous rubbing of the iron onto the paper and pressing down for added weight. We also found that using the thicker plastic worked better even though other websites say the thinner stuff works better. The thin stuff bubbled and wrinkled a lot on us.

We had some cool bags to work with and some not so cool. Old Navy, Sprint, Gymboree, Catherine's and Disney yielded some neato designs. We also had a lot of Safeway and BiMart bags which weren't very "ooh, la, la" but they did the trick.

Here are some pics of our little adventure.




Some completed versions:



Dad was on baby duty so they came out to watch the show.


There wasn't much of a "show" so after some bundling up Ada became our little helper.


I'll be posting my finished project here on my blog so be sure to check back to see what I came up with!

Good Luck to all who join in the fun, too!