Crayon Art and Ellie's Birthday

Nathan's best friend, Ellie, had her birthday party yesterday. They recently moved an hour away (sniff) so we were excited to drive out to their (beautiful!) house and see the whole family.

They now live by a lake in a house on a hill in the woods. Their front porch looks like a cracker barrel porch complete with wood rocking chairs. It's all kinds of lovely and I'm so happy for them that they found a house near Jonathan's job (the husband). But I do miss having them near! (none of my other friends are allowed to move away okay?)

For a birthday present I decided to attempt crayon art. I got the idea here. 

You see...I'm a pinterest mooch. I don't actually have a pinterest account (For good reason, if I did I fear my family would never see me again. Later I would be found in my spare upstairs room with 3rd degree hot glue gun burns on my fingers and scraps of ribbon in my hair, dead of dehydration. Death due to craft frenzy.) But I often see things other people post where they got the idea from pinterest and I'm like "oooh, I can do that too!" which is in a way still pinteresting but shhh...I've convinced myself otherwise.

Anywho.

I made this.

It was easy.

Here's the steps...

1) Glue crayons to canvas (or paper) (I used Elmer's glue)

2) Tilt down at an angle

3) Use blow dryer to melt crayons

4) Realize that this is fun and your poor child will never ever have an unmelted crayon to color with again

5) Decide you are making this easy craft for every child's birthday here on out

6) And you're done!

It takes a few minutes before the crayons start to melt but once they do it goes fast. I used the hair dryer on hot heat but low air setting.

Looking back I wished I used more greens but I didn't have any more.

Oh...and...

7) Put finished art project up and away so your child doesn't decide to take a crayon and color on it leading you to adding another crayon and trying to melt it to cover up the crayon drawing by the 4 year old without destroying the finished project. Yep. That happened.

I bought the paper flowers at Michael's Craft Store and then used pretty scrap booking paper to cut out her name and glue to the canvas.

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We had a great time at the party! This is Ellie's little brother Eli (he is 4 months older than Luke) Nathan was so excited to see him! (sorry for the poor photo quality)

Blowing out her Barbie cake.

Nathan and Ellie!!

Happy 4th Birthday Ellie Belly!