Ladies and gentlemen, we have another entry for the Craft Book Challenge on Ange's blog. The book is Fun With Friendly Plastic - Suzanne McNeill and involves... yes, you've guessed it, Friendly Plastic, also known as #46 on the mahoosive list!
I have often seen this medium demonstrated at the craft shows we go to, and back in November, at Harrogate, both me and mum bit the bullet and bought a little starter kit.
It involves a Teflon mat (the black thing), some pieces of a special kind of plastic (on the right), some sequin waste (bottom right) and a comb (top left). You also need a heat gun, which I already had.
Basically, you cut strips of the plastic and line them up. They are heated with the heatgun until the plastic becomes soft, you can then mesh them together and draw patterns using the comb tool. My first attempt was a black and silver chevron. I love this effect and think it will be perfect on a card for a man.
Next I heated a single colour of plastic and drew a design with the comb, before punching out a shape with standard biscuit cutters (yep, my biscuit cutters have been seeing a lot of use recently, not for biscuits though!). I like the effect, but I'm not sure about the colour!
A different approach is to heat the plastic whilst it sits on tin foil (did you know you can cut yourself badly on tin foil? Unfortunately I do, it bloody hurts!), cover with sequin waste and push a cutter into it. Turn the whole thing over and push from behind. When it's cooled down you take the cutter off. It doesn't cut through the sequin waste so you have to snip with scissors. Again, I like the effect but not the colours so much. The problem was that I bought a beginner's pack which meant I didn't get to choose the colours myself.
Finally I tried another project from the book. Four triangles of plastic sitting together are heated, then you use the comb to make a spiral. It didn't look great, so I then did some more lines on it. You can cut it square after this, but I like the sticky out bits so this has become a brooch.
I enjoyed playing with this medium and I will finish up the plastic I've got, but I'm not sure if I'll continue much with it, I suppose I need to experiment more and see what else I can do.
I'm linking up to the Craft Book Challenge on Ange's blog
