Melted Plastic Art- from the Archives

 

Several years ago at the Austin Maker Faire, I had a booth demonstrating plastic melting art and other projects such as a kazoo made out of a plastic straw. I had a lot of time while I was sitting there to come up with new projects. Another booth had empty plastic tape dispensers and I combined them with scraps from the plastic straws to make more melted plastic art. This is similar to fused glass art, but doesn't require special equipment and works at a much lower temperature.

This is another plastic melting experiment. I baked the lid of an egg carton. The whole thing shrank down to about 2 inches long, including the words and the barcode which seemed to be a sticker made out of a different type of plastic.

Here's a few more. The green one my mom made. It was a type of plastic that didn't shrink, so the effect was just the cut edges curling up. The white blob was an entire styrofoam cup with lid. The orange creation was made with thicker plastics, including a laundry soap bottle.

Lately I have been using a heat gun for plastic melting because my plastic melting toaster oven is in storage. I had been getting paper cups with plastic lids every day from the dining hall, so l've been trying to make the stack of lids into a coaster.