DIRECTIONS FOR MAKING EMBELLISHED CRAYON PAPERS

Most of the time, I feel like I could stop at the end of each direction and have a piece that I like. It takes a bit of fortitude to let the papers keep transforming, hoping that I will like the next stage as much as the one before. A little like life.

MATERIALS:

Brown paper grocery bag

Crayons – both regular and gel or slick crayons, also pastel crayons

Scissors

Iron and ironing board

Parchment or extra paper (bond or brown paper will work)

Watered down acrylic paint (dime sized paint in 4 oz. of water) – red or medium blue are my favorites but any color could work

Paper towels

OPTIONAL:

Felt the size of your paper or a little bigger

Sewing machine with similar or contrasting threads

Embroidery floss and needles

Beads, charms, buttons, ribbons or lace, metal foil candy wrappers – any little ornaments

Gel medium

INSTRUCTIONS:

• Cut open a brown paper grocery bag. I usually cut it into quarters or eighths.

• Draw three or four lines to divide the paper into various squares and rectangles. (Although, really, you are perfectly welcome to draw a landscape or a portrait...)

• Color shapes and symbols into your spaces. Maybe you’ll have a theme like birds, or cars, or flowers, or even just circles and triangles and lines. Let yourself just play with the colors for a little while. You will notice that crayons leave little chips of crayon behind – you can leave them on your paper. You’ll see why in a moment. Notice how bright your drawing is.

• When you have got most of the paper colored, fold your paper in half, and putting protective clean paper (parchment paper is best) underneath and on top, iron your picture (the wax melts through the brown paper so this is to protect your iron and board.)

• When you open it up you will see that the colors have dulled a bit and that the little chips of color have melted into both sides of the page. Now spray or rub a saturated paper towel of the watered acrylic paint over your drawing. Pat or re-iron to dry. You will notice that the paint-water has gotten into all of the little places that don’t have crayon. It is a good look.

• Re-color the paper with the same colors or, being courageous and curious, use other colors turning a green into teal or a red into an orange-red. Make sure that you re-color all of the dividing lines too. Fold your paper in half again and iron a second time.

• These next two steps you can do in this order or switch: gently crumple your paper. I usually have to crumple and open at least four different times to get the wrinkles small enough.

• Re-color your paper again but this time use gel, slick or pastel-type crayons. These crayon colors tend to sit on top of the other colors. Sometimes I will very lightly rub a very different color over the little wrinkles – like red over dark blue. It will hit the “mountains” of the paper leaving the original color visible in the “valleys” below. Experiment.

• When you feel like you have colored enough you can iron a final time or not: the colors stay a little brighter if you don’t, but the paper is a little waxier then too.

• Placing the felt under your drawing, straight stitch along the dividing lines. You are welcome to pin the felt and paper together to keep them from moving around. Choose a couple of areas to free motion stitch, outlining the shape or adding detail. Free motion stitching is a whole lesson unto itself. You can get someone to show you the particulars or, actually, this can be an optional step.

• These last steps are all embellishment and decoration. The idea is to put an extra dash of color and texture onto the colors and shapes that you have already drawn. Hand embroidery can enhance or even replace the machine stitching. The Chain Stitch and the Blanket Stitch are my favorites, but I have also used Herringbone and the Feather Stitch. Oh! And French Knots are great as they look like beads which prepares you for …

• Beading. I use both #11 seed beads and #8 pony beads the most often, stitching them in a line along the path of crayon color below. Try bugle beads, and certainly consider buttons and big accent beads as well.

• I also add shiny candy wrappers and consider stitching or gluing on small pictures or quotes.  Gel medium is a great glue to use on these as the waxy surface can make tapes or lesser glues difficult to be effective. Get courageous and inventive: glitter paint? Nail polish? Old recipes? Shrink plastic? There is a world of ornamentation out there.