Friday Featured Artist: Working with Crayons by Cindy deRosier

Hey everyone! Once again it's a great Friday! I am sharing another previous featured artist who has another great idea to share with you ;). Cindy was featured back in October and shared a neat scavenger hunt idea. You can read here fun idea here. Also you learn more about Cindy by reading her intro here. If you haven't had a chance to visit her gallery make sure you pop over there to see some great pages and inspiration. You can visit her gallery at this link: Cindy312. I am really excited to feature Cindy's fabulous work again so let's see her cool tutorial!

Working With Crayons by Cindy

Lead Fiskateer Tami Bayer asked a question recently about the strangest thing we had on our scrap tables. My answer was this:

Like many of you, we have plenty of these:

How do they go together? It's simple! After peeling the wrappers off all those broken crayons, grate them over a piece of paper. I prefer a lightweight, non-textured cardstock, but just about any type of paper will work. Depending on the look you want, you can use a variety of colors with either heavy or light coverage.

When you are happy with how the shavings look on your paper, cover it gently with wax paper and iron on the lowest setting. You will be able to see through the wax paper to know when all the shavings are melted. Remove the wax paper and your new paper is ready to use! If you decide you want a heavier application of color, simply grate more crayons on the paper and iron it again.

I should mention that my mini-grater lives permanently in my craft room. It is very difficult to completely clean the crayon off the grater. Fortunately, it is easy to find very inexpensive mini-graters at kitchen stores.

Here are some of the projects I've made using this technique:

My son and I made these cute tags for our Christmas gifts.

I cut a simple flower from my crayon melt paper to make a thank-you card.

This is a quick bookmark I made to put on a Valentine's gift.

You could use this crayon melt technique for accents, embellishments or even whole sheets of paper. Because crayons are acid-free, this paper is safe to use on your layouts as well. Experiment and have fun!

Cindy deRosier

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Thank you so much, Cindy, for sending along another great tutorial :) :)