My adventures in graphic design have been teaching me a lot about plastic recycling over the last several months. Our latest client is a plastic company that my sister works for. So somewhere in there I scored some In-Mold Label Substrate material (IMLS) from the sis for my own creative mayhem. What is IML you ask? The short answer: it’s made from 100% recycled plastic bottles and it’s used to make labels for industrial type bottles. When your Tide bottle is being set in the mold that makes it’s shape the label is put in place – in the plastic. Really, go look at your detergent bottle (if it’s a Proctor & Gamble product) and try to peel up the label. Ha! You can’t! It is literally part of the bottle, not a sticker on top. So it’s that label material that I got a small stack of. Crazy, I know!

So today, in the sunny outdoors I broke out a couple types of paint, the heat gun and the hot iron. The process was this:

First I just heated the stuff to see what would happen. It was cool. The stuff didn’t change color at all. Just kept shrinking and changing texture. It would form holes if I left the heat to long in one spot. I also heated both sides and it kept changing. (Click on a photo to see it larger)

Then I painted it.

Next I applied three different types of paint to see how they would react. The yellow-orange is glass paint, the red is acrylic and the last one is metallic fabric paint.

Seen here

Then I turned on the heat.

My favorite, I think was the glass paint although each turned out very cool, usable qualities.

Next I turned on the hot iron, ie the soldering iron. It melted through really quick. So I started drawing a little with it, going light on the pressure so I wouldn’t just melt holes into the stuff. Then I slapped on some glass paint, on both sides, drew on it with a couple different pens then turned the heat gun back on.

It shrank:  But it was cool.

So I’m not sure how exactly to work this into the fiber/mixed media art but I’m sure the opportunity will present itself. I still need try the sewing machine on the melted stuff.