Crafts with Crayons

First, let me apologize for being MIA for a while. But stuff happens so...on with the show.

Second, I'm going to take a quick break from posting recipes to write about some craft projects that I did when Cleo came out to visit. If we lived closer together, I would really feel sorry for my husband because Cleo and I both LOVE to be creative and no wall or surface would be safe.

If anyone has been on Pintrest I'm sure you've seen the project where you take crayons, glue them to a canvas and use a hair dryer to melt them. We sure enough did. Well I did anyway. Cleo took a different approach which I'll get to in a minute.

We knew that this project was meant to be when we went to the craft store and found not only canvases on sale, but also crayons! I decided to go with a kind of color progression for my canvas instead of a random conglomeration of colors. 

I used a hot glue gun to adhere the crayons to the canvas. It worked pretty well. 

Trying to take a picture while using a blow dryer is a bit more difficult than I thought. I ended up having Cleo hold the canvas up at an angle while I used the hairdryer in order to have the wax melt down the canvas. 

One thing I learned is that it really depends on which way and from which direction you are holding the hairdryer that the wax goes. But if you hold it at the end of the crayon you melt a lot from the top of it. But overall it was fairly successful. What do you think?

Cleo took a different approach with her canvas and crayons. First she used a black square canvas instead of a white rectangular one. And also instead of gluing the crayons to the canvas, she used a pencil sharpener to shave pieces off and arranged them in an image on the canvas. 

If you choose to pursue this method, take my advice and put down a liner. There were little pieces of crayon that I found even days later so trust me, this stuff goes everywhere. 

We made the attempt to try and use the hairdryer method to melt the wax to at least adhere to the canvas and that didn't work. But luckily due to our perseverance we came up with a great idea:

Yes. That, my friends, is a creme brulee torch. The husband and I received it as a gift when we got married but had never used it. And for our purposes, this worked wonderfully! 

We found that even though it looked like there was enough color on the canvas to make a solid image, the crayon shrinks up a lot as it melts so she had to do a few layers. Also if you blow on the crayons while they are still kind of melty, they meld together to make awesome swirls and patterns. 

Our crafting continued long into the night but we had a great time and it was totally worth it! 

Thanks for coming by and checking it out! Hope everyone has a great day!!