Craft stained glass windows from melted crayons

      Remember melting crayons to create beautiful stained glass window art when you were a kid? My Sunday School teacher did this in class with us many years ago. We would shave crayons with small hand-held pencil sharpeners onto white tissue paper. Then our teachers would carefully cover our tissue and shavings with wax paper and carry the layers over to an ironing board and melt them by rubbing a hot iron over the surface of the wax paper. 

      You can actually achieve the same melted effect by using a hair dryer if you wish. I also remove the wax paper after it has cooled. This only takes seconds to accomplish and then all you need to do is cut a black template from construction paper in order to frame your melted master piece.

      This craft needs adult supervision and patience. I've used some stained glass window frames for my teaching samples that are a bit complex. Design stencils for window frames that are simpler if your students are younger.  Have the children cut out the frames before shaving and melting crayons from black construction paper if they are older than nine. 

       Since I've published this craft here, designs at Color The Bible have been uploaded for coloring pages. These can easily be adapted for pattern making of stained glass windows.

• Geometric stained glass coloring pages - simplify this one in particular.
• If your students just feel like coloring detailed pages of stained glass windows see the whole collection under this link! - As of now there are almost fifty pages.

Above you can see that a small hand-held pencil sharpener is quite adequate for shaving crayons. Remove the paper first and don't use too many dark colors for your mix, otherwise, the results can turn a bit muddy. I used the original cut templates for my teacher's sample so that I wouldn't need to cut my stencils twice. After this I then created a template from the sample that could be printed out in black and white so that my students only needed to cut out the center of the design.

Just left, you can see the stained glass window taped onto an actual window. The colors a very brilliant. I have limited my color choices to reds, oranges and yellows in order to emphasize a monochromatic palette. You may wish to teach students about color mixing or the color wheel during this lesson by requiring young students shave together particular color combinations.

More Examples of Melted Crayon Crafts:

• Color a Heart Shaped Crayon Design