I Made A Necklace Version Of The Melted Crayon Table!

GUYS. Have you seen the melted crayon table going viral on Instagram?

SO PRETTY.

 It's by Chris Salomone of Four Eyes Furniture, and I can't stop watching his videos of making it:

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A post shared by Chris Salomone (@foureyesfurniture) on Feb 16, 2019 at 7:59am PST

 

I love that combination of a melty rainbow and wood grain, so I decided to try making a drastically scaled down version... as a necklace.

 

 And it kind of worked!

Here's the second one John and I tried:

 

There are some definite issues here, since we learned a lot of what NOT to do... by doing all those things, ha. I've been talking with other Maker friends about sharing more of my "fails," though, so let me show you what I learned. I know some of you can take this further and make it better - or if you're like me, you might find inspiration at the half-way point, and think of a completely different direction to take it.

First you need a wood pendant piece. These heart cut-outs from the craft store are a great size, and cost less than $2 for a pack of 6:

They're also thin enough that you can cut them with a craft blade:

Once John cut out a jagged line, I glued the two halves to a second heart for a backer: 

 Now we have a channel to melt our wax.

Here's where it gets tricky, though. Yes, already.

PROBLEM #1: We need a dam to prevent the wax from spilling out the ends of our channel.

 Metal tape won't melt and sticks OK, so that ended up being our best option. 

(Turns out duct tape is flammable. Oops.)

PROBLEM #2: The crayon wax melts INTO the wood, sealing and darkening it, like so:

 (I just noticed there's a heart in the heart! D'awww.)

To prevent this you'll need to seal the wood first. You can coat just the inside channel with a layer of wood glue, OR seal the entire heart with a wood stain or clear coat.

PROBLEM #3: Because these hearts are end-grain wood, they soak up stain like nobody's business, ending up way, WAY too dark:

This was a medium brown stain, if you can believe it.

So if you use a wood stain, use the lightest color possible - or just go with clear.

 

To recap: Seal your wood BEFORE adding the crayons, using a clear or extremely light colored stain. Then dam up the ends of your channel with metal tape.

Now let's talk about the actual wax part.

PROBLEM #4: Getting the crayons into those tiny cracks!

I first tried shaving the crayons with a blade, then adding the shavings with tweezers. This was excruciating and a near total disaster, DON'T DO IT. The heat gun blows the shavings all over the place, they stick to EVERYTHING, and then they melt down to nothing, so you have to repeat the process 3-4 times to fill the groove.

(I should mention we Dremeled out that swirly groove, so it's VERY shallow. However, it does eliminate the need for a dam, so... ?)

To keep the tiny shavings in place, we used a candle lighter first to get them to stick, then followed up with a heat gun.

While figuring all that out, we accidentally set this one on fire.

We're embracing the Fail today, y'all. EMBRACE IT. FEEEEL THE POWER.

 ("Oh, yeah. I can feel it.")

Eventually I figured out larger chunks of crayon work much better:

Though you'll probably need to add more, since they still melt down a lot.

And the heat gun can still blow these around, but not nearly as much as the shavings. You'll only need to barely bump them with a lighter, then follow up with a heat gun to fully liquefy the wax.

Here I am packing in more crayon after our first melt:

You can see we used wood stain on this one, which led to....

PROBLEM #5: Tape won't stick to freshly stained wood... and I hate waiting.

Granted, if you have some patience this won't be a problem. I, however, forged ahead before the stain had fully dried, which meant the tape fell off the wet wood and we had a bunch of Wax Overflow. Again, oops.

See how it ran out on the red side? We had to sand off the excess wax from the edge.

We added more wax and tried again, eventually reaching my "good enough" stage:

GOOD 'NUFF.

See that slight green stain on the front? That happened before we stained the wood, and we couldn't sand it all the way out. More proof you really need to seal this thing before adding crayons.

And last but not least, we have:

PROBLEM #6: Sealing the wax

For his table Chris used resin over the melted crayons, but I was afraid it would leak out our channel and make a mess. (Plus see the aforementioned IMPATIENT thing.) I tried some clear nail polish on our swirly test piece, which looked fantastic for about an hour, then started to break down into a dull goopy mess.

So don't use nail polish.

Next I found a crafter online who sealed her melted crayon project with Mod Podge, so I tried that.

NOPE.

Shocking absolutely no one, the Mod Podge peeled right off the wax. Then I had to sand the Mod Podge off the wood, which made it look kinda fuzzy and ugly and by this point I was SUPER done with the whole project.

So I glued some necklace bails on the backs and called it a day.

Boom. There 'tis.

(You can still see tiny bits of Mod Podge stuck in the one on the left, lol.)

The next morning the stain had fully dried - so the wood was a little lighter - and I took them outside for some beauty shots in the sun. Beauty shots make even semi-failed projects look pretty good, you guys:

And heart #2:

The wood isn't very pretty on these, but it's hard to say if that's the wood's fault or the fact that we kept spilling colored wax and stains on them before trying to sand it all off again. :D

I think the heart with the smaller crack is my favorite:

Obviously this is not a necklace you'll want to leave in a hot car, but other than that, it's fairly durable. So what do you think, gang? How would you make this better? Would you try encasing it in resin? Maybe dremel out a different pattern in the wood? Use different colors, maybe try some metallic wax? (OooOOoooh.) C'mon, brainstorm with me!

*****

And as always, if you'd like to help me and John keep doing what we're doing (though hopefully better than THIS), you can shop through our Amazon links here: USA, UK, Canada. or support us directly through PayPal! You're already helping in the most important way, though, so thanks for just being here to laugh at our ridiculousness. Love you guys.