Gabby’s go for it! – May

Gabbys++go+for+it%21+-+May

Gabby Hamm, Staff Writer

Hi Everyone, for this month’s DIY (do it yourself) project, I decided to do something a little different this month. I noticed that I always give basic birthday gifts like gift cards to Starbucks, or iTunes.  I feel like the person receiving the gift appreciates it more if it’s more thoughtful and made by you. My friend Ashlin’s birthday is coming up, so I decided that with our love for “Frozen”, I would make her a canvas with a quote from Olaf the snowman reading “Some friends are worth melting for.” For this DIY I used, a 12×16 in canvas, a box of 56 crayons, super glue, a dark and light blue sharpie, and a hairdryer.

To start, I plotted out where I was going to put the quote, and then I plotted out where I was going to place the crayons. I then wrote the quote how I thought I wanted it in pencil and then ended up redoing the entire thing before I finally decided it was time to sharpie that bad boy. Next, I glued each crayon starting with the darkest purple and ending with a hot pink. Basically backwards in rainbow order (purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, pink). I didn’t end up having room for the more neutral colors but the in between colors were quite helpful.

After gluing the crayons, I waited about an hour before bringing it outside to blow dry up the magic. I laid out some newspaper so that I wouldn’t get melted crayon all over my deck, and then I began to hold the canvas in a downward position to allow the colors to run. It took a few minutes before it started to melt.  I’m not going to lie I got a little nervous. Not nervous like this was going to be the end of the world or anything, but nervous that it wouldn’t work. As soon as I figured out what I was going to do as a replacement gift, the crayons finally started to melt. They would only melt about 3 at a time, not just all at once, and I had to rotate the canvas so that I could get the melted crayon more spread out along the white space. The crayon dried instantly, which was definitely a plus because it was cold outside. Once the canvas was dry, I wrapped it up, and it was all ready for my friend Ashlin to open up!

This was definitely one of the easiest DIYs I’ve done in a while. I would give it a 5 out of 5 star rating because it’s really hard to mess up, and it looks so cool.  I really liked this DIY in particular because there’s really no wrong way of doing it. This was not time consuming at all, and was actually fun too! If you need a good gift idea, I would definitely try to do something with melted crayons because it’s so cool to watch the colors run. Crayons are way more fun than watching paint dry!