Two of my favorite ladies, Katie of Bower Power and Sherry of Young House Love, decided to team up to pick one project per season from their Pinterest boards and create it. Instead of, you know, pinning a bajillion images and never doing squat with them. Here's Katie's post about the project and here's Sherry's.
{If you haven't heard of Pinterest, check out their About page. And request to join ASAP. Aaaand you can follow me with that cute little red button at the top of the page}
I thought it would be fun to participate in the link love, so I combed through my pins to find a project that I already had the materials for. I narrowed it down to four options at first: this cork garden marker, these cork drink coasters (remember what I said about us being alcoholics entertainers? We drink lots of vino), these zucchini chips, or these melted crayon shapes. Tough choices!
I chose Martha's melted crayon craft. I shaved two sets of colors, white with a smidge of black and tan, and teal with a smidge of blue and green.
I eventually got tired of using a pencil sharpener (word to the wise: don't use a sharpener that you'll want to use again for sharpening pencils), so I used a drywall anchor to shred up the crayon instead. Worked like a charm.
Then I ironed the crayon shavings between sheets of wax paper as Martha instructed. Since I didn't have any kraft paper, I just cut up a paper bag and used the bottom and one side as a cover between the iron and the wax paper. All about using whatcha got, no?
I was a little nervous at this point because the wax paper creations (especially the white one) didn't look like much. So I cut the wax paper into some random shapes and hoped for the best. I considered hanging them like Martha did, but decided instead to treat it like stained glass and taped it up on the guest bedroom window. Pretty. I think it turned out well, don't you?
I learned a few things in this process. (1) Definitely cover up your work space and use paper cups to hold your shavings. Crayon shavings stick to eeeeverything. (2) You're going to have to shave a LOT of crayons to get a ton of shapes, and you might very well get a blister doing it (I almost did). (3) If I do this again, I'll probably put the shavings in a thicker layer so the colors are a little easier to see, especially with the white, which basically turned out looking like wax paper with a few marbles. (4) I don't like how the tape showed through on the window, and maybe thicker shavings would solve this. No matter what, this project was completely free and fun to try! It would probably be perfect to distract (older) kids over the summer.
Actually, it was so fun that I went for extra credit... For dinner last night, I made the zucchini chips, a Caprese salad (tomato, basil, fresh mozzarella, and a tad bit of balsamic vinaigrette) and basil cucumber egg salad sandwiches, pinned just yesterday afternoon! All of it made for a fresh, summery meal that used vegetables right out of our garden.
The zucchini chip recipe I pinned is actually just a picture, so I had to guess on what to do. I don't have a mandolin, so I hand cut the zucchini (not as exact, but again, working with what I've got), then tossed it in olive oil, coarse salt, and pepper, and baked it at 350 for about 25 minutes. Given that I hadn't cut everything evenly, I think that would have been enough time/temperature to make everything crispy, but many of my zucchini chips turned out a little mushy. They still tasted awesome, though. Here they are before I popped them in the oven.
I found a recipe for zucc. chips if you want to try them again! I made them a few weeks ago and they were yummy! Let me know if you want it. :)
ReplyDelete