Melted Crayon Artwork

I had seen this awesome looking idea and pinned it to my Pinterest boards awhile back. I was just waiting for the right day to try it out! This summer has been sooo toasty with many days spiking to 100-109 degrees. Blech! That's just a little too toasty to be playing outside in the sun! So on a day that was, oh, just about 102 degrees, I thought of this craft! It would be a perfect time to do something super colorful with little man! 

The original link that I had pinned was just a link to an Etsy page and wasn't much help for directions. Thank goodness for Google searches! I found some tutorials HERE, HERE and HERE that gave me a good idea of what to do. The only problem was that they all involved using a hair dryer and I wanted to use the power of the sun to create our artwork. 

So, little man and I sat down at his craft table with a canvas I had leftover from a previous craft project, 3 boxes of 24 count crayons and some super glue. *Sorry I don't have any pictures of our "creating" process! We were so involved in creating that I forgot to take pictures!* We lined up the crayons in the order we wanted to glue them down. It was fun to let little man decide if he wanted more of one color vs another and help me arrange each color from dark to light. Then, once we were ready, I had little man hand the crayons to me one by one as I glued them down. (Side note: I used Gorilla Glue instead of a glue gun, because I thought that hot glue + little man might = a bad idea and also that the heat of the sun might re-melt the glue. But then I later read the back of the Gorilla Glue bottle and found that it is pretty toxic. :( Not that little man or I ingested it, but still, if I did this again, I would look for a different gluing solution)

After the crayons were all glued down, we let them sit while we had lunch to dry onto the canvas. Then I set the canvas up outside on an old box, to catch any drips. We kept coming back to the slider door to check on the progress of our artwork. After about an hour, the crayons just looked "sweaty". Hmmm... I was worried that our project might not work out. Maybe it wasn't hot enough to melt the crayons?

Another hour or so went by and I walked by the slider door and glanced outside and saw ... the most amazing wax rainbow ever! 

Gah! We had missed watching it melt! Bummer! Oh well, it was still pretty awesome to see what the heat of the sun is able to do! I brought it inside and we let it sit to dry before I let little man hold his artwork. He absolutely loves it! Whenever he sees it, he still proudly proclaims, "That's your artwork!". We are definitely going to be hanging it in his room on his newly designated art wall over his bed! I love how unique it is and the idea that if he did it again it could look completely different. This was a perfect, one-of-a-kind project for little man and he is so proud of it!