Melted Crayons Technique: Bring Your Inner Child Out To Play!

CREATIVELY CRAYOLA
Melted Crayons
By Jacqueline Fitzgerald Graham

(Materials)

-Food warmer
-Aluminum Foil
-Hearts In Touch Stamp (sheet #09, Miscellaneous II)
http://www.heartsintouch.com/
-India Ink Black
-Crayola Crayons
-cardstock (3), various colors (1 cardstock light in color to melt crayons on,
2 complementary colors for layering and background)
-adhesives (glue & acid free double stick tape)
-charms

(Materials for clay embellishments)

-Sculpey III
-Perfect Pearls
-Alligator clip
-Toaster oven

Directions:

Let's begin with the polymer embellishments. For safety, I generally use a toaster oven & utensils that are designated for the use of polymer clay only. Preheat oven to 250. Begin conditioning your polymer clay. You can condition your clay working it with your hands for several minutes, or press soft clay into a sheet and put it through a pasta machine, on the widest setting. Fold the sheet in half and put it through, fold-first, and repeat this process until it is conditioned to your liking. Lay the clay sheet on a flat surface. Using the Perfect Pearl colors of your choice, rub it onto the clay. Now, you are ready to stamp into the clay.

Use a stamp with nice bold patterns! Go to town with it!! Relax, relate, and release all of that stress you may have carried throughout the day. Whenever I do this, I make plenty enough to store for other projects that may come along. I measure and cut long strips. Sometimes, I use these strips to make neat frames for shadow box post cards! You will be heating these strips for 15 to 20 minutes. While this is taking place.....we can move on to working with the crayons.

I "LOVE" using a food warmer to work with melting my crayons. Watching all of those beautiful colors melt like butter brings out the kid in ya!!! Check for cool finds at your local yard sale or flea market! I found my food warmer for $2.00, and it has worked miracles for me!

Before we play with our crayons, let’s make a few more preparations. You want to have your food warmer on for a bit so that the crayon strokes will be nice and smooth. Meanwhile, I select the colors that I am going to be using, and tear the Crayola paper from the crayon. That step is a pure matter of choice. I personally like to work with my color palette of crayons without constantly having to stop between melt down to tear the crayon paper. Another thing that you can do in advance is ink your stamp so that you will be able to quickly stamp while the wax is warm. On this card, I used India Ink Black, and the stamp was HIT sheet #09, Miscellaneous II. Ink the stamp, and let it sit there until you are ready to stamp into your crayon background.

Time to play with your crayons!!! Take your aluminum foil and lay it on the food warmer to protect the surface. Lay the cardstock on top, and color or scribble to your hearts content. You can color small sections at a time, or you can create cool patterns. For safety in working with the food warmer, I use an alligator clip to hold the cardstock in place while I color. When you have your cardstock designed to your satisfaction, quickly put it on the counter, pick up your inked stamp and stamping into your cardstock while it is warm. If you have a stamp that you feel has a lot of details and need more pressure…put the cardstock on the floor, sit the stamp above it, and step on the stamp. *smile* This helps the stamp gives a nice, clean impression onto the waxed background.

Being that you did this technique on an entire sheet of cardstock, you have enough for layering. My stamped image is layered to black cardstock, then adhered to the crayoned cardstock. Both pieces are layered to black cardstock. <see photo above> All of the aforementioned is then applied to shiny gold cardstock.

Now we get to check the clay embellishment that we were preparing at the beginning of this tutorial. Twenty minutes is ample enough time to have a beautiful decorative clay strips. As I mentioned before, I save these to create shadow box post cards. Here is a small example:

Stamp Image: 486-I Woman With Dove by Stamp Oasis

It has the same format in design as the card pictured above—just added the strips, transparency and clear beads to make a shadow box post card. For the sample card pictured above, I painted the strips w/Diamond Glaze, and cut them into 4 small pieces. Placed them at the left of the card……and last, I added the perfume bottle embellishment (on the right) to give it that final touch!

Grab a box of crayons, bring out your inner child and play!!!