Melting Crayons for Christmas

When I stumbled upon this project, it struck me as something Jonathan might enjoy. He and I decided to make a melted crayon canvas for each of his siblings for Christmas. I had hoped that we would make small square ones, but when I went to the hobby store, they only had rectangular canvases. He knew that I was supposed to come home ready to do our secret project, and he was super excited, so I decided to let go of my preconceived ideas of how this craft would turn out and just buy the rectangular canvases. At least they were a good deal!

Here's Jonathan with our crayons glued onto Benjamin's canvas. He's sporting his lost-teeth smile, as you can see.

Here are the colors close up. We're probably going to do some room shuffling around Christmas, so Benjamin's canvas will likely hang in Jonathan's room, too, once they share a room. He wanted the "Crayola" sign to show on Benjamin's, but not Grace's.

Here are Grace's colors all lined up. She'll probably move out of Jonathan's room and into a room of her own, so we made hers pretty girly. Jonathan and I had fun sorting the colors. We saved the earthy colors to make one of these for Jeff, who really liked this project, too. Shhh, don't tell Jeff, it's going to be his Christmas present from Jonathan.

And, after some work from the blow dryer, here are the finished projects. I think I held the blow dryer at the wrong angle, because our melted wax splattered a lot. I had hoped that it would just drip straight down. But, Jonathan was thrilled with the results, so I didn't worry about it. He loved making these and is super excited to give them as Christmas gifts, so I figure my mission is accomplished! (By the way, I thought that new crayons would be best for this project, but used ones with the paper intact would have worked just fine.)

Merry Christmas to Grace and Benjamin from Jonathan!