Bird Lunula made from shrink plastic after baking and shrinking (larger than life!)
Since I was quite happy with the results of my first & second Lunula pendants, I decided to make a third, a bit more elaborate.
I started with inspiration from a Pinterest pin – which included three different Lunulae – and I chose the more complicated and detailed of the three. Of course, so much of Pinterest leads to Tumblr.. and Tumblr is like the wild-west of copyright violations and lack of credit/attributions… so I had no idea of the original source.
After I had already made my version though, and was just wandering around the web… I found what I think might be the original source – or at least a website selling the item pictured on Pinterest. Visit the “Slavik Paganism” page of Dragonscale.com if you’d prefer a metal (Bronze or Sterling Silver) version to my plastic one… (I would!)
Dragonscale.com describes the design as:
“Bird Lunula – Also called a lunitsa – Crescent moon shaped woman’s charm found in ancient Slavic and Norse cultures – shaped in the double bird image found in Scythian art – a reproduction of one found in a 8th century burial in Nitra-Lupka, Poland”
The bird lunula before shrinking
Like my previous shrink plastic projects, I used Grafix brand matte shrink plastic which starts as transparent and shrinks down to white in colour. I traced the design to both sides of my plastic and used black, bronze, and silver Sharpie markers. I didn’t sand the plastic before colouring, and found that large areas of colour weren’t as solid as I wanted.
Since my original Lunulae had short (about 1″) long ‘stems’ which folded over to create the ‘bail’ to attach the pendant to a chain or cord – and the resulting fold over was only enough to go around a toothpick… I made the ‘stem’ substantially longer on this version so it could easily go around a chopstick instead – and thus a larger cord.
Not quite right…
Although the finished shrunk plastic pendant was ok – the colours were nice and bold… I didn’t really feel that it looked metal. Like the other pendants, I opted to emboss this as well, using silver embossing powder.
Pendant covered with embossing powder before knocking off the excess powder
When the pendant was re-shaped and embossed, I decided to scratch some of the design back into the pendant, which I’m kind of fond of, though I might need to live with it for a while before knowing if it’s ‘right’.
Copper pendant along with a silver one and the bird silver embossed pendant.
More to come…
I still have a few more projects to share with shrink plastic – so stay tuned! In the mean time if you have some cool inspirational links for shrink plastic – feel free to share them in the comments below!
Some of the shrink plastic projects I’ve made recently…
