The Unplugged Theme this past week was wax. We did a pretty standard melted crayon/wax paper stained glass project. This was the first time I’ve done this project with the kids so they thought it was pretty cool.
We started with some old Ziplock baggies (you will ruin them so reuse some old ones), crayons left over from restaurants (I always try to remember to pocket the crayons from the restaurants that don’t reuse the crayons), a wooden mallet and a painting board (cutting board, etc). We removed the paper and sorted the crayons by color. We choose to only use leaf colors. We put all the reds, oranges and pinks in one bag – all the yellows and greens in the other. Then the kids got to whack away at the baggies on the board until we got very, very small pieces. You could use a cheese grater but this seemed much safer for the kids… albeit noisy.
Then we sprinkled the wax bits onto a piece of wax paper, wax side up (crayon bits that got too close to the edges did bleed over the edge). Place another sheet of wax paper, wax side down. Sandwich your wax paper between two pieces of scrap fabric (didn’t try it but paper towel might work). Iron until melted. You want that scrap fabric… I had some colors bleed through!
To make frames for widow panes, we folded two sheets of construction paper together and cut out a basic leaf shape… kinda like cutting out a Valentine Heart. Then we cut out the center leaving only about a 1/2″ frame. We traced the shape onto the wax paper sheets and cut out a center panel… slightly smaller that the outside of the frame. We used a glue stick to sandwich one construction paper leaf frame, one wax paper cut out and the other construction paper leaf frame together.
We used double sided tape to stick them up on windows throughout the house. They are quite pretty! One of the things I love about all the crafts we have been doing is how much the house is really being defined by the kids… and not just in that “toys all over” sorta way.