Getting Crafty

Emma and I have done a couple of crafty things over the past few days and I thought I'd share them. The first project came about after she broke a bunch of her crayons in half and asked me to sharpen all the ends. Apparently she thought she'd be able to color better if she had more sharp crayons to use, and what better way to multiply the number of crayons she has than to break them all up! Anyway... I sharpened the ones I could, and was left with a plate full of colorful crayon shavings. It reminded me of a project I did in school when I was a kid. So Emma and I arranged the shavings between sheets of wax paper, covered it, and set a warm iron on it to melt the crayon wax. It made a pretty blend of colors. Then I used some stencils to cut out some egg shapes, with holes in the center. When the wax cooled, I glued the wax paper to the egg shape, and we had instant window decorations. The wax paper and melted crayons let the light through just enough to show off all the colors. Emma said it looked like the crayon shavings were glowing. :) So now we have several of these colorful eggs decorating our front windows.

The other thing we did today was to create our own scratch-and-sniff artwork. I bought some kool-aid drink mix in different flavors, and added it to some finger paints we had. It smelled nice while Emma was painting, but as the paint dried, the smell faded. But now that it's dry, all we have to do is scratch a little bit of the paint, and we can smell the lemon, cherry, or grape scents--just like a scratch-and-sniff sticker! It was pretty neat. :) But a word of caution if you decide to try this yourself--the drink mixes did not mix well with all types of paint. We found the best paint to use was the Crayola finger paint--not poster paint. Emma wanted a few other colors, so I tried mixing our Crayola poster paints to make purple for the grape scent. But something in either the red or blue poster paint reacted with something in the grape drink mix, and the result was that the paint got bubbly and smelled like rotten eggs. I have no idea what went wrong there, but just be warned that not all types of paint will play nicely with the powdered drink mix.