Fall Pinterest Challenge: Crayon Drip Pumpkin

It’s Pinterest Challenge time again!  Sherry from Young House Love and 3 other lovely bloggers are hosting this season’s challenge.  This time around I decided to keep it in the family and get inspired by one of my cousin Mallory’s DIY projects: a crayon drip pumpkin.

I followed Mal’s directions pretty closely.  The only changes I made were to use hot glue to attach the crayons, and I used just red and orange crayons instead of a variety of autumn colors. 

Here’s what you’ll need to do this project:

A pumpkin (I used a white plastic pumpkin I bought from Target for around $12), crayons, a utility knife, a hot glue gun, a hair dryer, and newspaper to protect your work surface.

Start by breaking your crayons in half and peeling off the paper cover.  I followed Mallory’s tip and used my utility knife to cut a line along the length of the paper which made peeling the cover off much easier.

Then start gluing the crayon halves around the top of the pumpkin.  A little dob of hot glue goes a long way here.

I started with the red crayons and then filled in with the orange ones to make the color coverage somewhat even.  When you’re done gluing on the crayons your pumpkin should look something like this. 

Now it’s on to the last step: melting the crayons.  Fair warning here: this step is time consuming and very messy.  I started out working on the counter top in the kitchen.  After about 15 minutes of working the hair dryer on the crayons my pumpkin looked like this:

The crayon wax tends to splatter as it’s melting no matter what angle you hold the hair dryer at.  Luckily, since it’s crayon, it cleans up really easily, but I’d suggest doing this step in a garage, unfinished basement, or outside. 

I moved my setup to the basement and got back to melting.  I probably spent another 30-45 minutes just holding the dryer over the pumpkin to get all the crayons to melt down.  Like I said, it’s time consuming.  But once I was finished I was pretty happy with the result.

Note how splattered the newspaper and table are.  This is why I moved the project to the basement.  The good thing about this project is once it’s done, it’s done.  You don’t have to wait for the wax to dry or set or anything like that.  So as soon as I was happy with how my pumpkin looked I put it on the front porch to join the rest of my Halloween decorations.