I've had a box of clear Christmas bulbs floating around my craft room for years, just waiting for me to figure out what to do with them. In years past I used acrylic paint to make swirling designs inside my clear bulbs, but it is very time consuming, messy, and takes up a lot of space in my kitchen for far too long. A while back I read about an idea where you use old crayons to do much the same thing, using a hair dryer to melt the wax. I decided to give it a shot!
I already had a bunch of old crayons that I had been collecting for my "Crayon Candles" blog post. After becoming somewhat frustrated with the candle idea, I had put it on the back burner for a while. This means that I had plenty of crayons to choose from!
So, when you are making your Christmas bulbs, choose 4 colors for each bulb. Unwrap the 4 crayons and cut some small chunks off.
The chunks you cut should be about the size of a pencil eraser.
Here are the combos I chose for my bulbs. Please note that there is a fourth bulb, my tester!
Once you've got the four little nubbins of wax in your bulb, bust out the hairdryer and set about melting! The bulbs will get fairly hot, so unless your hands are made of asbestos, you will need some kind of protection. I used a pair of cotton gloves I found in the makeup/manicure section of my local super store, and those worked just fine for me!
Keep heating and swirling until the entire interior of the bulb has been coated, then turn it upside down and allow the excess wax to drip out.
Here are the four bulbs that I made. You may notice that the green bulb is not quite up to par.
I discovered with this green bulb that mixing wax from different brands of crayons just doesn't work out. Don't do it, mmmkay?
Once my bulbs were cooled and the hangers replaced, I used correspondingly colored ribbon to make hanging loops. I think they're super cute!
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