"Heart" Rock Cafe' and Melted Crayons

You all know me, I'll try anything once.  Craftwise.  (Get your sordid little minds out of the gutter!)

I found a cute idea on Pinterest, where you paint rocks with hearts on them, then leave them places for people to find.  Lord knows I have a neverending supply of free beach rocks, and hey! My paints hadn't dried out either!

Three of the four essentials in my life:  Laptop computer, fuzzy friend-slash-supervisor and crafts.  (The 4th essential was on the road that day).

Painting the rocks was easy and fun.  Took a couple hours one night to do the tops and sides, and an hour the next morning to do the bottoms.  I discovered that I absolutely cannot freehand paint a heart to save my life.   I even tried using my very fine tipped paint-pens, that you hold like a pen or pencil.  Every attempt looked like a blob.  So, I Plan B'ed it, and dug out some small heart stickers to use instead.  I actually like the way they look with the sticker instead of a painted heart.  Then I sealed them with a clear spray varnish.  These were just prototypes, just to see how they'd come out.  I like them...they are simple and cheap to make, and cute.  I will, however, apply extra glue to the backs of the stickers next time because the sealant kind of messed with the sticker adhesive, making it not stick, so that took another hour of time, slipping dots of glue under all the edges that refused to adhere to the rock.   

I left some in a few public places in Buzzards Bay and the parking lot of the Evil Empire in Wareham.  I don't know if people took them or not. 

The next project I just HAD to try was Melted Crayon Art, yet another idea from Pinterest.  The instructions are wicked easy; again a great and inexpensive project to do with kids.  Pick the crayon colours you want to use and hot glue them to a piece of canvas.  I used 2 of each colour, so you need at least 2 boxes of the 64-size crayons.  

Glue them in whatever colour pattern you like.  I went with rainbow for this project, but any colour combo can be used.  They are glued opposite to the direction you want the art to look when completed.  

Next I put the towel down on the bathroom floor, flipped the canvas over, and began to melt the wax with  my blow dryer, on high heat.  You can control which way the drips go.  Some colours also melt faster than others for some reason, and I am bummed that the wax melted under the paper wrapping too, staining it.  Still, the drippies look pretty!  I may give the greens another shot of heat because they didn't melt as much as the others.

Here's one in greens, blues and purples.  These have far less damage to the labels and I melted them longer too, but I accidentally splattered the green area w/ some blue wax.

Another idea involved melting broken crayons together to make one big Multicolour Super Crayon.  Well, I don't have any that were broken, but I did have a box that had mostly dull crayons so I used those.  It took awhile to slit the paper off them.  Then cut up the sticks into pieces.

I used paper liners in my muffin tin (with a little bit of water in the side not being used).  Mixed and scooped the bits into the tin.

Put the oven on 240*.  Some directions I've seen seem to use a melting range of 225* to 250* so I sort of split the difference.

I took them out of the oven once they were liquified.  I was a little dismayed at how much the tops had blended.

I let them cool on the counter for a few minutes, then put the tin in the freezer for 10-15 minutes.  They shrunk a tiny bit once frozen.  These are upside down and the paper wrappers.

Mixture showing tops and bottoms.  They look like psychedelic Reeses cups!  One broke because it hadn't melted all the way.