HOMEMADE CRAYONS!
This project was not originally one that we had thought of at the beginning of the year. But when things like "glass blowing" prove to be monetarily challenging, you get creative :)
Making Kate her own crayons was actually Jon's idea - and I loved it! He found a recipe online for making crayons and it is very simple. You basically melt caranuba wax over the stove and add in pigment (like good gel paste food coloring or other natural plant pigments.)
We had these cool fishy ice cube trays from IKEA so we decided to use that as our mold and make Kate fishy crayons :)
We made sure to use a pan that we were never planning on using for food again. You can use it for future projects and wax melting, but otherwise it will destroy your pan. Luckily this one was super old and ready for the recycling anyway.
*sprinkle sprinkle* like waxy snow!
Margo thought the whole thing just looked delicious :)
The wax melted beautifully at a medium/low heat. Once melted all the way you turn the heat down as LOW as possible.
After reading the instructions a little more closely, we did the next ones with more concentrated doses of food coloring, and they turned out ok!
The best part is that the extra wax on the outer edges of the mold can be re-melted down with the other wax to recycle and use in more crayons.
We made green, red and blue for our first try.
After letting the fishy crayons cool, we popped them out of the molds:
Jon gives this project a rating of: "Unsuccessful, but definitely try again."
Steph gives this project a rating of: "Fun and worth playing with for better results!"
We're really hoping that this is the first step in creating baby Kate's very own homemade line of toddler art supplies ;)
We made sure to use a pan that we were never planning on using for food again. You can use it for future projects and wax melting, but otherwise it will destroy your pan. Luckily this one was super old and ready for the recycling anyway.
*sprinkle sprinkle* like waxy snow!
Margo thought the whole thing just looked delicious :)
The wax melted beautifully at a medium/low heat. Once melted all the way you turn the heat down as LOW as possible.
The next step is to pour about 1/4 cup of wax into another container for adding color. The approximate measurement is 1TB of pigment per 1/4 cup of melted wax.
Our first attempt did not go super
well. We thought you were supposed to reserve a bit of wax and add the
color, then put that wax back in with your melted stuff on the stove.
So these first crayons are not very pigmented.
After reading the instructions a little more closely, we did the next ones with more concentrated doses of food coloring, and they turned out ok!
The best part is that the extra wax on the outer edges of the mold can be re-melted down with the other wax to recycle and use in more crayons.
We made green, red and blue for our first try.
After letting the fishy crayons cool, we popped them out of the molds:
Obviously this is something that we can continue to get better and
better at. We decided that next time we'll order pigment online so that
the crayons have more color to rub on the paper.
Jon gives this project a rating of: "Unsuccessful, but definitely try again."
Steph gives this project a rating of: "Fun and worth playing with for better results!"
We're really hoping that this is the first step in creating baby Kate's very own homemade line of toddler art supplies ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment