Nursery: Project #1

Where to start for a baby's room... Thank goodness for blogs. My mom sent me a link to a picture of a nursery and I continued to browse the website further... it was great. The website is http://projectnursery.com/. The amazing part of this website is under "Project Gallery" and it contains hundreds of nursery pics. A lot of the ideas I've found so far came from this website. For instance, there is an adorable monogram made from crayons. I plan to make this once we decide on a name... so watch for this post in the future.

I've seen a few other letter monograms made from crayons.... here's the other example.

I think I prefer the one without the labels.... but it's still TBD.

Like I said in the last post, I really want to incorporate a lot of color into the baby's room. Another website I found had melted crayon art... which is apparently very popular right now (big surprise, I've never seen it before... haha). Spearmint baby (http://www.spearmintbaby.com/) is where I found the first example of my project today.... the melted crayon art. There are tutorials all over the web, but here's what I did:

What you'll need:
Canvas (I used a 16x20 inch canvas)
Crayola crayons. I bought 2 of the 64 packs. There are certain crayons you won't use so you'll likely need more than one pack. I also read on another blog not to try to use the cheap crayons because they don't melt appropriately... stick with Crayola!
Hot glue gun
Hair dryer
About an hour

I started by going through all of the crayons and deciding which colors I didn't want to include... I decided not to add the browns, greys, black, peach, etc. This was purely a personal preference and I decided beforehand that I would do the colors of the rainbow for my canvas.  Here's what I had left over in the first box:

Then... because I'm a little crazy and I really wanted it to look good, I sampled all of the crayons I had to get them in the correct order... roughly I did ROY G BIV. After testing the crayons, I eliminated 2 more colors that I didn't think looked very bright.

The crayons didn't fill the 20 inch canvas side to side, so I ended up using 15 crayons from the second box. I decided to add more orange, yellow, green and a few extra blue. As you can see below, there seemed to be a lot of reds and violets compared to the other colors. There were a lot of blues as well... but I figured since this is for a boy's room, it would be good to have a lot of blues.

After adding the additional colors, here's the order I had: 

Next, I warmed up the hot glue gun and started gluing the crayons onto the canvas. The tip should face down and they should be as close together as you can get them. Decide ahead of time if you want a certain part of the label facing up... I went with the Crayola label up. Start gluing. It's been a LONG time since I've used a hot glue gun... the glue cools quickly, so get them on the canvas fast.

This is the canvas with all of the crayons glued on:

Next, find a place to melt the crayons. Warning: They do splatter off the canvas. I did this part outside so I didn't get wax all over the house. Line the ground with newspaper or paper bags and make sure to put them behind the canvas as well. The canvas should be tilted against the wall with the crayons at the top. I adjusted the tilt during the heating process but I'm not sure it really made much of a difference.

Here's a pic of my belly (mid project) for your entertainment (and yes... I'm HUGE):

So the camera flaked out a bit during this part of the process, but basically I did sections of heating with the dryer on high and hot. I occasionally turned it down to low blower when the wax was splattering too much or if I wanted to concentrate on a certain couple of crayons. I did the red and orange together... concentrating on this section until they started to melt (seemed to take 3-5 minutes for the first section, then more like 2-3 min per section after that). I then did yellow and green, followed by blue, then indigo and violet together. Here's a horrible picture (wrong camera setting) after round one:

I wanted more of the bottom of the canvas to be covered so I made a second pass over the colors. I basically heated them until the tip of the crayon was all melted. Some colors melt quicker than others.

After the second pass, you can see there was a lot more color:

There were some sections where chunks of wax accumulated so I heated those again as well (which will also help the wax to run all the way down the canvas):

I kept reheating until I was happy with the distribution of wax. Notice the splatter onto the paper on the wall:

Here are some closeups of the final product.

I love this canvas and think it is a great start to the baby's room. I hung the finished product in the hallway to give you a better idea what it will look like: