Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Final Post

Yes, friends, this is my last post on Holly Sews and Crafts.  No weeping, please, we all knew this was just a place for me to practice writing and blogging.  Now it's time to FLY, yay!  Please find me at my new blog where my first post is already waiting for you.  It's soon to be followed by a lot more fun things, such as twitter, facebook, and even an etsy shop!  All kinds of fun things are waiting in the wings, so take the first step with me and follow me at the Grass Floor Stitchery!  Hooray!
<3,
Holly

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Welcome Back, Holly!

Well, after my, ahem, hiatus... I'm back.  What have I been doing, you might be thinking.  I've been brainstorming.  And marinating.  And stewing.  And coming up with all sorts of awesome ideas for us!  By us I mean  you, my reader, and me.  We're crafting buddies.  Am I wrong?  I've also been making stuff, but just not blogging about it.  For shame!  The first rule of crafting nowadays, it seems, is "Thou shalt not craft without blog." 
Speaking of crafting buddies, my "analog" group (as opposed to "digital," that's you), Escape Artists, will be losing a member this month.  My mom, Leta Jones, will be moving back to Arkansas.  That leaves Tammi, Sherry, and me.  We are sad.  But I hope we can continue crafting across two states. 
For our final foursome craft night, we all worked on en caustic creations.  En caustic art is art made with melted wax.  For our wax component, we used crayons.  For the heat component, we used hair dryers.  We all came up with different end products.  I made an en caustic color wheel, using all 48 Crayola crayons in my  brand new box. 

 
This is my finished product. 
You want to make one too?  It's pretty easy. 
  1. First, go buy a canvas board size 16x20, and a box of 48 crayons.  You'll want to get brand new crayons to get the best effect.  Once you get home, prepare a work surface with newspaper or a cheap throw-away table cloth. 
  2.  Dump out all the crayons and arrange them in rainbow order, setting the black, white, grays, and browns aside. 
  3. Then, get out your trusty hot glue gun (you can buy a craft-size one for about $4 or $5) and start with the red crayon.  The color wheel I made is slightly off center on the canvas because I set all the browns by themselves off to the side.  So mentally divide your canvas into two sections.  One section will take up about four-fifths of the canvas and the other will be one-fifth.  Glue that red crayon to the top center of the big section.  This is the starting point for your wheel.  
  4. Imagine the wheel is a big circle that is divided into equal thirds.  The sections are arranged so that they form an upside-down "Y" inside the big circle.  The red is the stem of the "Y" and the blue is the left-hand branch of the "Y" and the yellow is the right-hand branch. 
  5. Once you've got your primary colors glued on, fill in between the red and yellow with all the red-oranges, peaches, oranges, and yellow-oranges from your rainbow.  The red-oranges should go towards the red, and the yellow-oranges should go towards the yellow.  The orange crayon should be somewhere in the middle, and the peaches can be somewhere in the middle too.  It's up to you where best to put them, use your own sense of color to guide you.   
  6. Fill in between the yellow and blue with all the yellow-greens, greens, and blue-greens.  Once again, use your own sense of color as guidance, but the blue-greens should go towards the blue and the yellow-greens should go towards the yellow, with the green in the middle.  
  7. Fill in between blue and red with all the purples and pinks, with more bluish purples going towards the blue and the pinks next to the red.  This should take care of all your colored crayons, except for the blacks, whites, and browns you set aside earlier.  If any colors didn't fit in, don't worry, throw them into your kids' crayon stash and forget about them.  As long as there are no gaps in your circle, it's fine!  
  8. I glued the white, grays, and black sideways inside my color wheel, and my browns vertically in the smaller section to the side of my wheel.  Glue the browns with the points downwards, they will melt better.  
  9. Finally, take out your hairdryer from its drawer in the bathroom.  Plug it in near your covered work surface and start applying heat to your crayons.  I turned my canvas in all directions as I applied heat only to the crayons whose tips were pointing towards the floor at the time.  That is how I got the outward-sprawling pattern of my melted wax.  For the whites and grays in the center, I just kind of let them mix in with all the other colors/directions.  For the browns out to the side, I only wanted them to drip downwards on the canvas, so I didn't turn the canvas while I "dried" them with the hairdryer.  
The wax hardens fast, so there's hardly any wait period once you've got the wax melted out of the crayons to the point with which you're happy.  Maybe you want more "white" showing than I've got on mine, maybe you want less.  There's also lots of variations you can do using crayons in en caustic art.  Sherry, Tammi, and my mom all used different techniques than I did, and all to fun and creative effects.  You can experiment with color, backgrounds, and placement.  My mom used a chalkboard and only red, orange, and yellow crayons.  The end result looked like a night bonfire, pretty cool actually.  So once you've followed these steps you can use the process to come up with your own originals.  Good luck!