Tutorial: Crayon Monoprinting + Faux Batik Paper

This is a great technique to get some “fancy” papers for card making and collage.  This is a fun project to do with you kids, just remember to carefully supervise them.  It is also a great lesson in mixing colors and it involves one of my favorite things: melting stuff!
Supplies:

• Warming tray (vintage from the thrift store, pretty common and usually in almost mint condition)
• aluminum foil
• crayons
• exacto knife
• oven mitts (not your good ones, the ratty old ones in the drawer)
• paper towels
• white paper or cardstock
• black water color paint or extremely watered down black acrylic paint and brush

Plug in the warming tray and it will immediately start heating up.  Cover the top of the tray with a sheet of aluminum foil, smooth the foil down, the flatter the better.  Once the tray is hot start drawing designs with your crayons, I used my exacto knife to cut the wrappers off.  Draw slowly, you want a generous amount of wax on the aluminum foil.  For a solid print with no white from the paper showing through you will need large pools of wax.  For an open design (we’ll talk more about that in a minute), a heavy handed scribble is perfect.  For splotches of color use your exacto knife or an old pencil sharpener to shave off small bits of wax from a variety of colors.
Once you are happy with you design put on you oven mitts and smooth the paper down on top of the hot wax.  Be careful, that tray gets hotter than you would think, I can’t imagine using it to keep food warm, can you say scorched?  You will be able to see the design absorbing into the paper, you can rub the back of the paper with you oven mitt to make sure as much wax as possible has transferred.  Carefully peel paper off of tray, starting from a corner.
Set paper aside to cool, it won’t take long.  I like to make another print to help remove the leftover wax and then I use a paper towel to clean the rest of the residue off of the foil.  I found that I could reuse the foil for about three designs before the colors just got too muddy.  When that happens, just peel the dirty foil off and smooth on a new sheet of foil, don’t forget to put those oven mitts on!
The printed paper is finished, I liked how the solid colored pages looked, but I wasn’t so excited about the ones where I could see the paper peeking through and although I liked the crayon shaving prints they really didn’t pop.  The answer is to turn these papers into faux batik paper.
Load a wet brush up with black watercolor or thinned acrylic and start painting.  The black will cover all the white peeking through and the wax resists the paint!  I loved the results and now we have two different, but similar, beautiful papers to craft with.

Reusable shopping bag

I made two of these bags for my friend Lisa to use as a totes, one for her and one for her daughter.

I love this bag it is made just like those plastic bags that you get at the store only is fabric! They are lined and can even have a pocket to fold up into! The detailed picture tutorial can be found here.

I also made this one for the reusable shopping bag contest on craftster.

This is the front. I made the drawing with a regular black crayon and the leaves are rubbings. Once you are finished drawing, iron with a pressing cloth to set the crayon. This bag is machine washable, but no dryer!!!
Here's the back, you can see the pocket for holding the folded bag.

And here's the bag all folded up. I need to make more of these, they are really sturdy(they can carry 3 2-liter bottles). The tutorial also includes instructions for making button holes so the bags can be placed on the bag holders at the stores. This is a great way to cut down on plastic bag use and the design options are limitless!

Project: Recycled Crayons Round 2

After a trip to the Dollar Tree for some supplies I decided to revisit the recycled crayon project. I bought two muffin tins and some heart and star shaped baking cups and did a little more research and this is what I've found out...150 is what most people recommend (even Martha Stewart) setting the oven on and that is should take approximately 20-30 minutes for them to melt and this is what I tried. My ovens lowest temperature is 170, but I was not worried about this, after all I know that I can cook them at at least 250 and they won't burst into flames. It did take longer than 30 minutes, but I was opening the oven every five minutes to peek and take pictures.Here they are in the oven, this is after about 35 minutes, getting runny, but still lumpy on the back. You might notice that the ones on the left are in coordinating colors and the ones on the right are just random colors thrown together, they both turned out great. Fresh from the oven and cooling on the stove.Here is the back of the mixed crayons, not that pretty, but the other side looks great.Here are the finished crayons, aren't they pretty? Here's a better detail of the shapes and by the way the crayons in the cupcake tins melted faster.And here are the ones from the muffin tins, the color variations are really noticeable.

Some alternative instructions I found said to preheat the oven to 350 and when you put the crayons in turn the oven off and leave them for about 15-20 minutes, I may try this next time. It has also been mentioned that using silicone bake ware makes it easier to remove the finished crayons and there are also a bigger variety of shapes available. I put mine in the freezer for a few minutes and they popped right out. I also wanted to mention that I chopped these up with a knife into pea sized pieces, the last time I made the chunks smaller and this is not necessary. This is a really fun and inexpensive project (I only spent $5.00 for the tins) I would definitely recommend trying it!

Project: Recycled Crayons

I have seen a lot of people making recycled crayons lately and since I live in a household with two small children we have broken crayons everywhere. I had read this tutorial about it here a few months ago and bought a package of star cake tins and so late tonight I randomly decided that it would be a fun quick project.

Here they are waiting to go into the oven. Did I mention that my husband was on the computer and I couldn't go and check the directions, oh well, I can remember something I read briefly a couple of months ago, right? So I preheat the oven to 250 (note that the tutorial says 150, I was only 100 degrees off) and pop them in. After waiting a few minutes to make sure they weren't going to burst into flames or something I wandered off to watch TV. About 10 minutes later I went to check on them and I had crayon soup, not the variegated crayons I had expected. A little defeated I take a shower while I wait for them to cool. The backs are a solid color and not looking very exciting. After they cooled I pulled them out of the tins, the front side looks cool and the good thing is the only way you can really screw this up is if they do burst into flames in you oven.

I know that they will be enjoyed by my kids, they are big and easy to handle, and have no idea what they were supposed to look like. I will definitely make these again (I do have a coffee tin full of broken crayons and my mother still has a container full from when I was a kid) and bake them at a lower temperature and see if they look more like I expected. I think they would be a popular item at a craft show and they would make great gifts or favors.