Strawberry Frenzy - Jewelry Set

I'll be attending Anime Central 2010 this year (it's coming up soon!) and I'm walking in the fashion show. The designer I'm working with has me wearing a Country Lolita outfit with a strawberry motif. While she is providing the dress, a matching purse, and a necklace, I was asked to provide some other accessories of my own.

So I decided to start off by making a ring and some earrings to go with the outfit!

I've been experimenting with making plastic jewelry from Shrinky Dinks, and while I've had varying levels of success, I figured they would be the way to go for making some simple plastic strawberry pieces. It took a couple of tries to figure out which colors to use (because they get darker when the shrink plastic is cured) as well as how much to scale up the final size that I wanted (because it's not exactly 3X like the instructions say it is).

Here's the final setup, with one cured piece and two pre-cured pieces:


I used Sharpie permanent markers to draw and color the pieces first. Then I cured them in a toaster oven, and drew on the seeds afterwards using a black Sharpie. The holes in the earrings were punched before curing, using just a single-hole puncher.

I then added some wire and earring findings (wire was to make the strawberries face the right way), and glued a ring base onto the back of the unpunched strawberry.


TADAA!!

The backs are a bit rough, because the plastic got stuck to the paper I had it on in the oven, which had some lines. Those lines unfortunately transferred onto the plastic. And Shrinky Dinks sometimes end up curling up on themselves while they're curing, and while usually they unroll eventually, the Sharpie sort of melted off a little onto the backs, so there's random patches of red and green on the backs of a couple of the pieces. But nobody's looking at the backs anyways, especially not while I'm up on the stage.

So all in all, I'm quite pleased!

Next in line is a set of wristcuffs and sock toppers with felt strawberry dangles!

(And of course, I need to somehow find time to finish my cosplay(s)...)