Saturday, May 26, 2012

Melted Crayon Heart Canvas

My 6 year old crafty mini me was searching for something awesome to make her favorite Kindergarten teacher for an end of the year present.   Her teacher is moving to a new school, so she wanted to make her something for her classroom.    We found a picture of the crayon heart canvas on www.pinterest.com, of course!    So, here is a quick tutorial on how we did this!

First, we cut a heart shape out on my Silhouette Cameo.   I am not a freehand artist...at all!   I traced the heart on to the canvas trying to center it.   I put a crayon in the compass positions to try and make sure it was evenly spaced.    After that, we spent some time getting all our crayons in the order we wanted.   After you know the order you want your crayons in, you just line them up with the bottom of the crayon lined up with the pencil mark.   This makes sure the heart shape is uniformed on the inside.  (The next one I make, I am going to try not having them fanned out so much.   I'll post an update if that works better!   I'm not real happy with the bottom of the heart, but it is still super cute!)

  After you get the crayons lined up and are happy with the design, it's time to glue them down!   I used zip dry to glue mine down and it worked very well.   I tried to keep the crayola emblem facing up so they were all uniformed.   After the glue dries, it's time to melt the crayons!   This canvas was MUCH MUCH MUCH more messy than the one we did with the crayons straight across the top.   I ruined my pants with little flecks of colored wax everywhere!!

To melt the crayons, you just need your hair dryer.   You could use an embossing gun and it would probably go much faster.   I held the canvas and just rotated it as I went around to make sure the wax fanned out.   If it's not making it to the edges, just remelt the crayon drippings and the "wind" from the hair dryer will keep it moving in the right direction.   Just keep rotating until you are where you started.   Let it set for a few minutes for the wax to harden and you are DONE!  


It took about 15 minutes or less to melt these crayons.  From start to finish, I'd say it took an hour and a half, but we had problems finding enough crayons.   I would splurge and buy the 130 box of crayons next time just for all the different shades that come in it.    We used a box of 48 and some extra crayons from another box of 24.   I didn't actually count how many crayons we used, though!

Her teacher LOVED it.
 
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