a creative activity to get in the spirit of St. Patrick's Day
We love the holidays around here... I try my best to always have some kind of activity for my kids when the holidays roll around. Even if it's just a coloring sheet, I like to feel "in the spirit" and have an opportunity to get creative and have fun. For Saint Patrick's Day I wanted to try to bump up our regular coloring activity by exploring melting crayons and creating a rainbow that runs into a pot of gold. I'll be honest... the results didn't match what I had pictured in my head. But we live and we learn and I can share some helpful ideas that might give you a little bit better results. BUT! It's cheap and easy and requires little effort, and that is all we really want in an arts and craft activity, right? Fun, easy, cheap, and creative. Sign me up!
First and foremost, you want to pick out your pot of gold. You can easily google "pot of gold" or "black and white pot of gold" to find one you personally like. I'll share the one that we used below and you can just save it to print out and color.
Now comes the fun part with creating a rainbow. Grab a box of crayons or two and pick out your favorite shade of each color. I let my son pick his own rainbow and I picked mine. He used off brand crayons and I did Crayola; his actually melted easier than mine, but I liked the pigment of my colors better... it's up to you! Glue your crayons to a piece of paper in rainbow order and get ready to melt them!
*** In hindsight I don't like the way I placed the crayons on the paper. The idea in my head was that we would melt the crayons and they would roll down and curve into a crescent, rainbow shape leading behind the 3D pot of gold. It was very challenging to achieve this with them lined up side by side in the corner... here are some alternative methods to try:
Try breaking up the crayons into 5 or 6 pieces and gluing them in the shape of a rainbow, then when you melt them you know you will have the shape you are looking for with a cool ripple effect.
Or you could try gluing them spaced out (either all on one side or all at the top of the paper) and melt them so that each individual color runs down its own path, instead of getting mixed in with each other and creating a brownish look. The next time we attempt an activity like this I will definitely try different placement to achieve the look I had in mind. But I wanted to share this activity anyway because it was super easy to do.
Grab your hair dryer (or heat gun if you have one) and get ready to melt some crayons! A couple of things I learned from this: The blowing of the hair dryer will splatter melted crayon everywhere. Make sure you are doing this is a location that the crayons can be easily cleaned up if they drip or blow off the paper. Also, try using a low setting and a diffuser so that it is mostly just heat rather than blowing air. Try to hang it up with clothespins if possible. I put the crayons too far in the corner to be able to use the clothespins, I ended up just holding it with my hand and trying to maneuver the shape of the drip one handed. (See notes above for better placement of crayons.)
These are the rainbow drips that we got! Still a super cool effect, but like I said the next time we do it we will have better placement to get the look we were going for. We ended up cutting all of the white parts of the paper off and the extra crayons off the paper. Use the tips above and you should have better success with melting the whole crayon and get a more clear rainbow look.
While your melted crayons are cooling off, grab your pots of gold and decorate/color them however you choose! We just used markers but you could use any medium (crayons, pencils, makers) add glitter, pom poms, etc. Once you're finished, cut
out around the border so there are no edges.
Use the scrap paper that you cut off from around the pot of gold to create a couple of thin strips. Fold these strips in half and then fold each half in half to create a square. Take one side of the square and put a thin line of glue on one of the outside edges, pressing it onto the inside of another side of the square, creating a triangle as seen above.
Once the triangle has dried down a bit, pick one outside edge to glue to the pot of gold. Place it at the bottom edge of the pot so that it stands up on its own with one side of the triangle flat on a surface. Once this bond is secure, glue the one side of the triangle that is facing outward (not on the pot of gold and not on the table) and put it on your rainbow creation.
Display your pot of gold and melted crayon rainbow on a flat surface or hang it up! If you want to hang it up, it will look better if you create a square shape instead of a triangle on the back so that the rainbow effect will look like it is going straight into the pot of gold.
Get creative! As always, feel free to share your creations with me!
I'd love to see what cool ideas you and your kiddos come up with!
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