Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Tiny British Phone Booth

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 Since we are often making things that reference our love of British culture (Sherlock Holmes pillows, a Ms. Marple room box, etc.) we decided that it was time to make a little phone booth. The phone booth is small enough so that it can rest on a desk top or be included in a railway scene or used for whatever you want! I used blank Shrinky Dink paper but you could also make a phone booth out of cardboard, fimo, or fabric. The directions that follow are to make it out of shrinkable plastic. One drawback of this is that you will not wind up with perfection. My phone booth is a little crooked and the edges do not line up perfectly. However the translucence of the plastic does make for a nice effect.
Materials
  • shrinkable paper. I used two sheets size 5 x 8 inches and had some scraps left over for future projects
  • thin black Sharpie
  • colored pencils
  • scissors
  • printout of a phone booth image, taken from directly in front, sized at 3 x the size you want the final phone booth to be  
Steps
  1. Work on the scratchy side of the Shrinky Dink paper. Trace 3 identical phone booth sides around the outside and where the windows will be and cut them out around the outside carefully.
  2. Use colored pencils to fill in color and accents like the gold crown at the top
  3. Write the word "telephone" backwards and trace that using the Sharpie. Fill in around it in white
  4. Leave the windows blank
  5. Trace the back. This fourth side will be solid red
  6. Trim the booths so the top edge does not curl out like it does in real life, or it will be hard to glue them together, Make a straight line on three of them. 
  7. Bake in the oven at 350' for 1-3 minutes. This is where you can run into problems. You want the pieces to curl up while they are shrinking then relax back to being perfectly flat. You may want to use a toaster oven for better control and bake one or two pieces at a time. Flatten them with a spatula once they have relaxed back down and are still pliable.
  8. After the pieces cool you can assemble them. Mine did not line up perfectly so I made a tiny box out of card stock and glued the pieces onto this.  
  9. Enjoy! Now you can make one in blue, write "Police Box" on it, and make the Dr. Who fan in your life very, very happy.


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