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Thursday, July 17, 2014

Teen Craft Program: Melted Crayon Art

I'm a lover of Pinterest and use it heavily for teen program ideas. I've seen these crayon art pieces and have longed to try it. Doesn't this look cool?

Pin from Pinterest that got me excited about the project

It fits in with the science summer theme, so I jumped at the chance to host it.

I had a great response - 9 teens, which is a really good turnout for me.
Everyone seemed to have a good time and left with some cool art work.

Some of the teens glued the crayons on the canvas directly but the majority glued them to cardboard and held that above the canvas, letting the colors drip down. 

The Good: 
It's creative, fun, and lets teens play.

The Bad: 
It's messy - Stay away from the walls
I only had 2 hair dryers - wax from the crayons got on both of them.
I tried using an embossing heat tool - it worked well for one but then started smoking.

What I would do differently:
1. More Hairdryers. So I thought we would have another station. No one really seemed to mind waiting.
2. Away from the walls and more newspapers everywhere: the program took an hour and then the clean up started. Even though I put down newspapers, the wax got everywhere.
3. I would have a volunteer help me with holding the cardboard above the canvas, as you really need two hands for that and one hand for the hair dryer.
4. Buy more canvas - I only had 10 and I was really nervous about having to turn someone away, Luckily that didn't happen, but I would have hated to do that.

Here's one of the art works. You can see more on the video I made for the library.


The Verdict: I can't wait to make my own creations and I would do it again at the library in a heartbeat.

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