Crayon Heart Mobile

Valentines day is coming up very soon and the children have been getting involved in some heart related crafts. We loved the look of the crayon window pictures we had seen but we didn't have any waxed paper so at first we dismissed this idea but my husband came up with the idea of printing / staining normal paper with melted crayon, so we thought we would give it a go and see what happened.

As you can see the effect is rather stunning, we ended up printing flat sheets of paper and paper after it had been crumpled to see the different effects left by the melted crayon. After assembly our mobile looked like this.

Doesn't it look lovely?  The children love crafts and we are hoping to try as many different crafts as we can, this was the first time they had melted wax crayons and it was quite exciting. First we took some old broken crayons in valentine related colours and the children grated them.

They then sprinkled the gratings onto baking paper, we placed some card onto the table first to protect the wood surface.

After they were happy with their design, we put another sheet of baking paper over the crayons and ironed them until the gratings were melted. Keep checking as this happens very quickly.

After the wax crayon has melted and cooled very slightly, peel off the top layer of baking parchment and put a normal sheet of printer paper or any other paper onto the wax, replace the parchment and iron again. This time the wax will stain or print the normal paper, we managed to repeat this process several times before all the wax ran out, sometimes we crumpled up the paper first to get a different, textured effect.

Leave each stained sheet to dry, the photograph above is one of the crumpled pieces of paper drying. It doesn't take long to dry then you can cut out your chosen shapes, we have chosen hearts for valentines day.

We cut out lots of different size hearts, the photograph above shows the range and contrast in colours, patterns and textures of the paper.

We then strung the hearts onto a piece of driftwood that we collected in the summer, any thing will do here you could even use any twig from the garden. We chose the driftwood as we felt it gave an interesting dimension to the mobile. Each piece of thread has to be long enough to accommodate how many hearts you chose to thread, we have threaded 4 or 5 on each string along with a wooden bead at the bottom to finish it off. You can use a needle to thread on the hearts and beads or just use invisible tape on the back.

There you have it an alternative way to use wax crayons to make something very pretty to hang in the window.

We had very little sun when we made this as it was a very cloudy day, but we had a few minutes to snap this picture to try to show the effect of the sun shining through the hearts. Trust me the photographs really do not do justice to the hearts at all.

They are very beautiful, each one is uniquely coloured and patterned.

As we made so many of these hearts, I have kept some in the craft stores to be used on other projects, I think they would look really nice on greetings cards or even gift labels.