Shrinky Dinks

Shrinky Dinks are a children's toy/activity kit consisting of large flexible sheets which, when heated in an oven, shrink to small hard plates without altering their color or shape. They reached the height of their popularity in the 1980s. Most sets are pre-printed with outline images of popular children's characters or other subjects, which are then coloured in before baking.

Shrinky dinks were invented in 1973 by Betty Morris of Brookfield, Wisconsin. The first kits were manufactured by the major toy companies of the time such as Milton Bradley, Colorforms, Western Publishing and Skyline Toys. The shrink plastic is still available from many retailers and can be used for anything from charms to pins.

Prior to heating, the thin, flexible polystyrene plastic sheets can be coloured with felt-tip pens, acrylic paint, colored pencils, etc. and cut into shapes. However, oily or waxy substances (such as cheap colored pencils, crayons, or oil paint) are not suitable because they melt or burn in high heat. When heated in the oven or with a heat gun, the plastic shrinks by about 5/8ths and becomes thicker and more rigid, while retaining the colored design.

Although Shrinky Dinks is considered to be an arts and crafts product for children, many adult crafters find the product to be suitable for jewelry making and other projects. For this purpose, blank sheets are available sometimes known as Shrink Plastic.

Recently, University of California, Merced Professor Michelle Khine has applied Shrinky Dinks to create tiny structures for the application of Microfluidics to topics such as stem cell research.

Pop-culture references

*California rock band Sugar Ray formed in 1992 with the name "Shrinky Dinx", but later changed it (upon threat of lawsuit from Hasbro).
*Family Guy - In a running joke, God invents Shrinky Dinks but, while he is getting them out of the oven, Albert Einstein steals them (Einstein earlier did the same thing with a patent office security door and the Theory of Relativity).
*Futurama - In "Anthology of Interest I", Fry invites a 500-foot-tall Bender to make Shrinky Dinks together, before the latter's untimely demise at the hands of a similarly-enlarged Doctor Zoidberg.
*Psych Shawn finds a box of Shrinky Dinks in his childhood bedroom drawer.
*The Simpsons - In "Home Away from Homer", Ned Flanders refers to his penis as a Shrinky Dink.
*The Broadway musical [title of show|" [title of show] "] mentions Shrinky Dinks in the song "Die Vampire, Die": "You have a movie to make, Shrinky Dinks you can bake..."

External links

* [http://www.shrinkydinks.com Shrinky Dinks homepage]
* [http://www.joobli.com Shrinky Dinks Christmas]
* [http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/LC/article.asp?doi=b711622e Shrinky-Dink microfluidics: rapid generation of deep and rounded patterns]
* [http://www.jove.com/index/Details.stp?ID=692 Shrinky-Dink Hanging Drops: A Simple Way to Form and Culture Embryoid Bodies ]
* [http://www.bladerubberstamps.co.uk/site/how_to_use_shrink_plastic.php Techniques for using Shrink Plastic ]