Our kids are on the older end of the craft-time scale. Our oldest is 17 so he has actually been retired from craft time for quite a few years.

However, when he saw this one, he couldn't help but comment on how cool he thought it was. When a friend of his was over later in the day and stopped to make a similar comment, I realized that even though I made this with our 10-year-old son, this is something that can be done with kids of any age. I guess everyone loves a crayon!

I have seen this idea, adhering crayons to a canvas and melting them, circulating around the internet lately. When I began pulling together the materials to do one with our 10-year-old son, I decided we would accent the bright, happy colorfulness of the melted crayons by doing some masking and adding some paper embellishment. We used Fiskars punches to help us implement these ideas.

We began by adhering a row of crayons to the top of a canvas. Our canvas is 11 x 14 inches and we used Glossy Accents by Ranger.

Next we punched shapes from an old magazine to create masks and used an old chipboard alphabet set for the lettering. We decided to have colored lettering so we traced around the letters with a pencil and painted inside the lines. My son wanted a graffiti look so we did not worry about perfect painting. There are some white areas and we left the pencil lines. We then adhered the chipboard letters on top of the painted letters. Since we were going for a graffiti look, allowing the wax to seep under the letters was fine. If you do not want any wax seeping under the edges, be sure to completely cover the surface of your masks with a strong but temporary adhesive and use one that will not soften (and thus release) when heated.

After the masks were all in place, we began melting the crayons by using a hair dryer set on high heat and about 12 inches from the crayons. The melting happened very quickly. We went from cold crayons to being finished with the melting in around 2 minutes. We used a Fiskars Cutting Mat under our canvas but the wax really splatters so I recommend spreading newspaper under the project.

We had a little more wax under our masks than we wanted so we cleaned away some of it away. We used a bamboo skewer to scratch away some of the wax. The "B" still had more of a red tone to than I wanted so after scratching away as much wax as possible, I repainted it with a very thin coat of paint to still allow some of the red to show through.

To create the smiley face, we used the XXXXL Circle Lever punch for the face. Using 2 of the petals from the X-Large Oopsie Daisy punch, we created 2 eyes. Using the X-Large Round-n-Round punch, we punched a mouth. To achieve an even smile, I punched a circle and then holding the punch sideways, pressed my thumb along the bottom edge of the punch and dropped the circle back into the slot. My thumb being underneath held the punched circle in place so it was still partially within the cutting area. The result after punching again are the 2 shapes seen above.

This is a craft that is very easy to adapt to the skill level of the child from simply melting the crayons (the most popular part of the craft in our house) to creating elaborate masks. It is also one that adds a bold, fun accent to their bedroom decor.