Dean and I decided we needed to get a little artsy this weekend. I had seen this melted crayon project on Pinterest and knew we could create our own version, and you know we have more than enough Crayons laying around this place, so yesterday after school we headed to Ben Franklin and purchased a Canvas. Dean really wanted the 24x36 inch canvas for our masterpiece, I wanted the 11x14, but we compromised and got the 16x20, which actually worked out perfectly. We got home and I put Dean to work picking out the Crayons he wanted to use. This took about forever. We needed a little more than 50 Crayons for the project. He finally got them picked out and lined up in the order he wanted them.
Then we (and by "we" I mostly mean "I") spent the next 2 hours unwrapping them. They definitely don't make Crayons like they used to. They use some kind of crazy super glue now to wrap those suckers. Helpful hint if you ever have need to unwrap the paper from Crayons - soak them in a bowl of water for a few minutes first, then the paper peels off much easier. Well, some of them do. Some of them are still really hard to get off. It was frustrating! Once all of the crayons were paperless, we needed to glue them onto the canvas in the order Dean had decided on, which was mostly Rainbow order. This took some trial and error too. I started out with hot glue, because that's what the other people had said they used where I got the idea for this project. Well, that didn't work very well. First, the crayons started to melt, then after the glue cooled, the crayons just fell off. So, I ended up using Aleene's Turbo Tacky Glue (in the gold bottle). It worked perfectly, but it just took longer to dry, which meant Dean couldn't help with this part at all because no bumping the crayons or the canvas!
By the time all the crayons were adhered and the glue was dry, it was dark outside and we had planned to do the rest of the project in the front yard. So we had to wait to finish until this morning. Dean woke up bright and early ready to get to work! He was so excited!!
So we set up our canvas against the palm tree in the front yard, ran and extension cord to my heat gun and got to work. Unfortunately, the little bit of wind meant this wouldn't work and we had to go back inside. But we got a little area set up inside and that worked out just fine. Dean was FASCINATED by the crayons melting and dripping down the canvas and the colors blending together - it was lots of fun! Joel and I took turns with the heat gun and we had our newest piece of home made art completed in no time!
The finished project turned out really well if I do say so myself! Dean's pretty proud of it! I think we might try to see if we can't frame it somehow in a shadow-box type of frame to hang up in Dean's room. It was a pretty cool family weekend project!
