Colorful Suncatchers: A Great Craft for Kids

Lately I've been really struggling with my photography.  I feel like I've been so frustrated with how my pictures have been turning out...especially the last couple of skirt ones.  I really wanted to delete my last post because I disliked my pictures so much (and the kids didn't feel like posing for any more pics to remedy the ugly ones...).  Instead of deleting the post though, I decided to try to better my pictures with a NEW project.  Something colorful.  Something fun.  And most importantly, something that I don't mind looking at as the front page of my blog.

This was a fun project...and I like the pics too!!  Crayon art has been all over Pinterest, so this is a twist on that.  I've been collecting plastic lids for the last couple weeks, and so when our plans fell through this morning, I decided to pull them out and do this fun art project.

Ready to see how they are made?


Here's what you'll need:

A hairdryer or embossing tool
Crayons
Clear plastic lid
A piece of poster board or newspaper to cover your surface...this is going to get messy!!

First, go ahead and remove any labels on your lid.  I also poked a little hole through my lid so that it would be easier to pull a piece of string through it later to hang it.

 Now the real key here is NOT to melt your plastic lid.  At first, I started melting my crayons and then let Ellie mix them around on the lid.

 She had a lot of fun swirling around the crayons on the lid.

 We also held the hot tool away from the lid and let the crayon drip down as it melted.  Crayon splattered everywhere, which Ellie thought was totally awesome.

 A pretty simple craft all in all.  We hung ours up in a window that never really gets direct light (remember, these are made of crayons--which melt--so be careful where you hang them so that you don't have a drippy mess in your window).  I'm going to make sure that our window never really gets too hot, and if it does I'll move it somewhere else in the house.  Such a fun colorful project though!!  I hope you enjoy making your own suncatchers!

If you liked this post, you might like these other art posts:

An Eric Carle inspired art  day.  

and a 5 senses art day: