Shrink Film ....Success?

Refusing to be beaten by the shrinky dink film, I gave it another try.  The problem I had with the first attempt was that the film curled up on itself and welded together that way while it was still in the oven.  A tip I read somewhere was to place a sheet of vellum on top of the film while it was in the oven, and that was the magic trick that made it work.

So I started by drawing out a name, cutting it out, and adding a hole punched at the top to attach it to a keychain or zipper.

Next I let my son color in the letters - we used Prismacolor markers, and the markers on the film are pretty messy. 

Since my son loves anything Spider-Man-esque, I took the thin pen side of the markers and added in little spiders and webs into the red letters:

Onto a sheet of vellum it goes.  This was an 8 1/2"x11" sheet, for an idea of the before size.

With another sheet of vellum on top to keep the film flat.  Sorry for the printing - this was scrap vellum I salvaged from some mail, thinking vellum is a terrible thing to waste.

And... whadya know?  It shrunk down and didn't end up in a hot little curled mess!

You can even see the little spiders and webs in the red letters, which is really neat.

The finished size is about 3" tall, so it probably shrunk down about 50%. 

There was a little bit of curling even as the film cooled, and I'm not really sure how to keep that from happening.  The black marker looks a little caked on, as you can see on the "e" above, but touching it, it does not actually feel flaky.
This stuff is a lot of fun to play with.  My son is so excited to have his name that he helped make, he even carried it to bed with him.  All kinds of ideas are swirling in my head for the next shrinky project.