Roomie Craft Night: Melted Crayon Art

So a little after 9pm on Tuesday night, my roomie Miss D and I had one of those normal late night urges to craft something fierce. We decided to recreate this, a melted crayon art dealio that we recently stalked via pinterest thanks to our friend Mrs R. Once we figured out what a heat gun was, we were off to Home Depot to make our purchase. Home Depot didn't have the cheap one in stock so we were off again to Wal-Mart who, luckily, did. We also bought a bazillion crayons and some canvas.

What You'll Need:

Crayola brand crayons (you'll see why)

Canvas OR foam-core board

Hot glue (or another kind that won't melt)

A heat gun

STEP 1: Arrange the crayons how you want with the point facing down. If you want to do a color pattern, make sure to not only look at the actual color of the crayon, but the color of the paper around the crayon. Miss D and I decided to do one canvas each (but in a spectrum to be displayed together) to make it more of a fun roomie craft, but you can do however many canvases you want. We also decided to do more of a earth tone pallet to match the colors in our house.

 STEP 2: Position the crayons so the color name on the paper wrapper is facing up, this will hide the distracting CRAYOLA sign. You can, in theory, use any sort of crayon you want, but we found the other brand we bought had a much busier wrapper.

STEP 3: Hot glue (or gorilla glue or tacky glue) the crayons onto your canvas or foam-core board. 

STEP 4: With the canvas tilted, start heating the crayons with the heat gun. Move the heat around to make parts melt more and tilt or straighten the canvas to get the desired drippiness. To create layers, stop every once in awhile to let the wax cool, and then melt more on top of that cooled layer. 

STEP 5: After melting as much as you desire, let cool completely, then apply a fixative of choice.

WUD UP, GANGSTA!? YOU'RE DONE!

 I did the left side and Miss D did the right!

What do you guys think? After we finished this piece, Miss D and I stayed up til after 2am painting with melted crayons. Apparently this wax craftiness is way too addicting!

peace,
k.

I Take My Sadness Out On Home Decor

This weekend was going to be epic. Think this:

ONLY BETTER.

Unfortunately the week following up to my departure to epicness was brutal. I worked double shifts on top of my 15 school credits and wedding shoots. By late Thursday night, just hours before I was to leave Friday morning, I realized I still had 4 shoots to edit (about 5,000 pictures total), 5 papers to write, 10 online quizzes to take, 1 math test to study for ALL BY MONDAY. As hard as I was working all week, I had still gotten behind on life. My heart broke as I stared into the vast and overwhelming weekend work and realized that going on the trip with my friends and family wasn't a possibility. My ONE vacation I had planned all year, and I had to stay home.

Well, whenever I get depressed and a little weepy (and trust me, I most definitely was), I take it out on something crafty. There is something about creating aesthetically pleasing functionality that chases the blues away.

So, I took to my room. I moved in nearly a month ago, and still had only about a half of my stuff unpacked. The rest was in un-maneuverable piles around my tiny space. It was stresssssssss. My jewelry and my books were the biggest problems. I don't have a lot of area to put extra furniture, so a bookshelf was out of the question. I also don't have enough room on my vanity to put jewelry, but if I kept it hidden in my closet I knew I'd never wear it. So, I came up with a few crafty solutions in my sadness.

I made two of these frames to put my earrings on. They sit upright on my vanity and take up no space at all! Plus it presents my earrings in such a way that I'll be sure to wear them!

Then I needed a solution for my necklaces. There is a corner in my room where my laundry basket lives that needed an extra kick of something. So I found a stick in my backyard, tied some red and white ribbon on it, and hung it on the ceiling. Ta da!

The pictures don't really show it very well, but it's pretty cute. It also presents my necklaces in a way that I'll be sure to wear them too!

And then there were the books. I found an old weathered piece of wood leaning up against my parent's garage, painted some cute weathered looking yellow stripes on it, screwed on some L-brackets, and BAM... made a shelf!

 It's out of the way but still viewable. Those books are far too cute not to show off, right?

Because I still had to do my mountain of other work (ps, I'm pretty much finished), I couldn't get to finding a place for my rings, getting a mattress (yep, still sleepin' on the floor!), finding a proper desk chair, or figuring out what to do with one of my walls, but, all in all, it was a pretty good success. I now have a non stressful living space and I all but conquered my never ending work load for the weekend. I only had to give up watching fireworks, leaving my house, being hygienic, spending priceless time with friends and family, and my one and only vacation planned this summer. Not worth it, but it had to be done. Such is life!


peace,
k.