Lately I’ve been seeing a ton of the same fabulous melted crayon projects online. One of my favorite bloggers, Meg Duerksen, recently posted her version of it which you can see here. (I adore her blog and it truly inspires me to love color and to use my camera more!)
I love the projects that I’ve been seeing but of course I had to put my own spin on it, literally. Living in Houston, which is about to have the hottest summer on record, helped a lot with this project. It’s definately something fun to do in the extreme heat besides cry and sit by the fan. Just kidding! I haven’t been crying. At least not because of the heat, probably over those swiffer commercials again.
This project was super easy and taught my girls about the effects and power of the sun’s heat. I don’t know if I should classify it as a science project or an art project.
We used an old canvas that I had in the garage and a brand new box of crayons that was super cheap thanks to back to school deals. Using up your old broken crayons would have worked wonderfully with this project but I’m the worse at throwing all those loose chunks of crayons away.
The girls helped me peel all the crayons and then break them into smaller pieces.
Then we did what anyone that needed melted crayons when it was 105 degrees outside would do, we put the whole canvase with crayons scattered on top in the sun.
It was extremely hot outside and the cement was frying our bare feet.
At first I doubted if it was going to work because nothing happened for the first ten minutes. But slowly and surely it started to melt.
And once it started to melt, it went fast!
After about 35 minutes the crayons were mostly melted. I took a small bowl and placed it gently under the canvas. Then I spun the canvas!
Crayon flew everywhere! It was on my foot.. the fence.. the cement. If you do this move the canvas out into the grass before you spin it and don’t wear pants or shoes! (ok wear pants outside but keep your ankles bare!)
That is dried crayong splattered all over my foot and ankle. It’s a dirty job but well worth it. Want to see why?
So pretty. Then when I turned my back a cute child drug their fingers through it and spread the colors a little bit more.
It’s still wonderful and I love it hanging up in the kitchen. When we move next week it’ll go into the playroom.
My mother in law was here this weekend and asked me who the artist behind this painting was! Ha! It’s your grandkids and I’ll sell it to you for $1,000 or braces in about 7 years…..
I liked this project so much that I’m going to do more experiments with this in the future. I would love to use several smaller canvases with the same color grouping on each one or give the kids long straws and have the blow the melted wax around the canvas. So many fun things you can do using crayons and the sun.
I love it. Do you? What’s another way you could use the sun and crayons?
you can do something similar but glue the crayns to the edge and angle it a bit and let the sun melt it and it run down the canvas. (not as messy)
I have seen those and just wanted to try something different. Thanks for sharing.
Hi – found this on Pinterest. Gave it a good go yesterday in sunny CA. Wasn’t quite 105 out so it took a couple hours to achieve melting point. Here’s the interesting thing…we did 4 of them. One for each big kid and one for me. 3 of the 4 melted and we learned we used too many crayons. Diidn’t spin them just used fingers and sticks to move the colors around. However, despite being in the exact same spot to melt, my 2 year old’s crayons never melted. They were in the direct sun for over six hours. Didn’t even get soft. Weird, yes?
We are going to question daddy the scientist on his theory as to why this might be and we spent a lot of time talking about wax, candles, melting, liquids, solids and color combos. Great little project!
Thanks!
Now I want to do several more and see if I can get one that doesn’t melt! Let me know the theories as to why it didn’t melt. We might redo it soon before it gets really hot here but use mirrors to reflect rays to develop hot points.
Were the crayons your two year old used a different brand from the ones you and the others used? If they weren’t did they look strange or different? These both could have made it so that they wouldn’t melt.