Today, the older boys and I made some melted crayon shaving crafts for decorating our sukkah. They look really nice! Here’s the lowdown:
Start by peeling and shaving your crayons. We used our cheap craft table knives. (Do not use a pencil sharpener, though. It may seem like a good idea, but if you do it, you will get the crayon jammed in there so hard you will need to sharpen a pencil over and over until it is gone to get the crayon out. And if you try it again, but with you sharpening instead of a child, you will have the same result. And use up another pencil to get the sharpener functional. Hypothetically, of course. Ahem.)
Everyone chose their own colors and we shaved ours onto paper plates.
Here’s my finished plate:
You don’t want anything to be too thick. The next step involves arranging the colors on a piece of waxed paper. Keep in mind, the wax is all going to get liquid and melt.
Now top with another piece of waxed paper. Get your iron to a low or medium low (we did a 3 out of 8 ) and move it over the waxed paper. I wouldn’t keep it still too long. The crayon melts and becomes liquid. Keep a cloth handy to wipe off your iron if crayon escapes the waxed paper – it comes off easily if you do it immediately.
Here are our first three:
When it is cool, cut your crayon and wax paper sandwich into shapes. It might crack, but you can touch it up with the iron. You can also draw something, probably with marker, and put your waxed paper on top of it so you can follow a template. Here are our finished projects for today. (They are a little more abstract here than we plan to do in the future: leaves, fruit, and vegetable designs).
I normally laminate the sukkot decor we put up (because of rain and because I LOVE my laminator!), but I’m not sure how that would work with this since the crayon would probably melt again, and maybe leak.
So much fun!
