I am so impressed with the results I got using the printable shrink plastic for my tags that I wanted to show you how much better it is than regular pre-sanded shrink plastic. You can see quite clearly the difference in printed quality. The top one is the one I printed last year on pre-sanded shrink plastic and the bottom one is the Grafix Inkjet Shrink Plastic. But let's take a closer look. Even though the pre-sanded shrink plastic can be run through an inkjet printer (and it did the job quite adequately!) but the ink bleeds if it gets any moisture on it and it has a definite blurriness about it. Now let's look at the Grafix shrink plastic. You can see how crisp and clear the printing is. It looks so much better than the pre-sanded shrink plastic. So the difference in quality of the printing is quite obvious but let's take a look on the back of the two samples to see what other differences there are. See how the type is reversed? You print on the reverse side of the pre-......

At 2.30am this morning as I was attaching the last of my shrink plastic charms I discovered a couple of the tags didn't have holes: one was only partially punched and the other missed getting punched altogether! Oh, dear, I desperately need to get to bed but not before I solve this problem. Given that I had already wasted 2 sheets of this film from my pack of 6 sheets, there was none left to print off more so I really needed to use those last two tags. There was only one thing for it: drill the holes and hope that the plastic didn't shatter. I decided to start on the one with the partial hole hoping that it would be less likely to crack. And to my relief, my little battery operated drill easily and cleanly drilled a 1mm hole without any damage to the tag at all. Next I lined up the hole-less tag and drilled straight through that one as well. Success! So all is not lost if you forget to punch the holes before you shrink, or even if you decide afterwards to add more charms to ......

It's back to the production line again today to finish off the last and most important item of my giveaways: my contact details! I ordered some clear Grafix Inkjet Shrink Plastic from Over the Rainbow to use as tags on my jewellery giveaways because it's strong and durable. Plus, it looks like a little charm dangling from the chain so it does double duty as being both practical and aesthetically pleasing. The beauty of this product is that you can run it through your inkjet printer and there is NO sanding is required! So let's take a look at the process. According to the package instructions, it will shrink to between half and one third its original size and suggests that you make your items 50% bigger than the finished size.  Armed with this information, I used a size 12 font to create my label and then printed it onto plain paper so that I could measure it against my template. It was exactly 50% bigger so I went ahead and printed it onto the shrink film. (More on this at......