Our family started a new tradition for the month of October, called 'The thirty-one days of Halloween'. The link takes you to the site where I got the idea, and hopefully one year I'll be able to document the entire month and make an Instructable for it.

For now, I am posting one of the days we tried this kid-friendly craft (think age four (4) and up) and created these pumpkins with crayons melted on them.

I got the idea from this blog post. The author used larger pumpkins, but I changed it up a bit and learned a few lessons to make this craft in the future even better.

You can tell by the photos that we used all kinds of colors. That's what kids do and I love it. I made a black & purple one, but it didn't come out as well as the colored ones to me.

I hope you experiment with crayons melted on pumpkins and show me what you made!

Step 1: Materials & Tools

We did the crayon art on five mini-pumpkins. The total cost for the project was about $5 as I believe the mini-pumpkins were about $1 a piece.
It took us a total of about an hour to do all five pumpkins. I would estimate that one pumpkin would take about twenty (20) total minutes to do this craft, including removing the paper from the crayons. It definately could be done as a pop of color for a last minute craft with the kids or decoration.

A note of useless information: Every October, I buy a mini pumpkin that represents each member of my immediate family so we already had those as part of our Halloween pumpkin display.

The crayons were old and used and most of them were already broken.

The remaining tools were stuff I had around the house.

Materials & Tools:

Miniature Pumpkin(s)
Ten to twelve crayons of the color of your choice per pumpkin, can be broken or used - Recommend to use all the same thickness, any brand
Optional: Dish with water to soak the crayons paper off
Knife and Cutting board
Hot glue gun (we use low temp) with glue
At least two paper plates per pumpkin
Hair Dryer
Optional: Paper towels for easy clean up

Step 2: Get the Crayons Ready

To prep the crayons, you have to remove ALL OF the wrapper.

It's harder than you think!

I had my kiddos peel the paper off of their selected colors of crayons, or use ones that already had the wrapper off.

One blog suggested to soak the crayons in water overnight - something I tried, but was not satisfied with the result. I think I would have been better off just sitting there and peeling. There was a thin layer of paper that would not come off using this method on a few crayons. I'm guessing it's just the glue used to keep the paper on the crayon itself.

The second part to this was that I chose to cut the crayons to similar sizes.
I chose one of the broken crayons and cut the remaining crayons to that size. I'm not sure if that helped, but I think it evened out the crayon drips.

I will also place a note here NOT TO USE larger sized crayons with the thinner ones. The different thicknesses of crayons melted at different rates and too much heat (as shown in the next step) made all of the colored wax drip off the pumpkin almost completely.

Step 3: Glue Crayons to Pumpkins

With your hot glue gun, place a pea sized amount of glue to the top of the pumpkin. The cleaner the pumpkin, the better the glue will stick.

Place one crayon on the glue spot and press down for a few seconds to adhere the crayon to the pumpkin. I did not let my four-year old do this, but the seven year old pressed his crayons down himself. The four year old told me what colors to place in order.

Make a ring around the pumpkins with the tips of one end of the crayon at the stem.

On one or two occasions, I had to remove the glue from the pumpkin as it was not sticking to the crayon. I started over with a new dot of glue, and in one instance, we just didn't use that one crayon. I speculate that the problem was the crayon itself, either it was too dirty or waxy to stick to the hot glue.

Step 4: Melt the Crayons

Set the pumpkin with the crayons stuck to it on a paper plate to protect your table. I went an extra mile and set a towel on the table underneath just in case. There is a small amount of splatter with some crayons and I wanted to be prepared.

Holding the hair dryer about three to four (3-4) inches away from the crayons, set it for HIGH and watch the magic of melting crayons.

Here is where you can see that the larger or thicker crayons do not melt as fast as the thinner ones.

The total time it takes to melt on one pumpkin is just about five (5) minutes.

When all the crayons are melted to your satisfaction, stop the hair dryer and transfer the pumpkin to a second plate, optionally lined with a paper towel to cool.

One of the photos show my kids playing with the remaining melted wax on the plate, creating more 'art'.

I let the pumpkins cool about 10-minutes before letting the kids touch them again.

Step 5: Display...

My children LOVE to see their work on display. I know it gives them a sense of pride and I want to foster that.

I just hope they will be willing to let their "art" go when Halloween is over.

Have fun!