Making Art/Making Crazy

During a completely lazy, yet somehow magically stressed-out day when the house was trashed and I had too many things to do, I took a hint from The Artful Parent to make melted crayon suncatchers as though this would somehow release me (and the children) from the chaos, tension, and emotional nightmare of our day.

So I grated old crayons.
And the children arranged the shavings in sheets of folded wax paper.
And sort of mixed them altogether in a huge mess where many got smooshed into our floors, where now there are assorted spots of varying shades.
At first, I set the wax paper on the stove because the oven was on. I left it too long and black wax melted onto my enameled cooktop.
Then we tried the iron (between two sheets of plain white paper) with worse results.
Then I lowered the setting on the iron and it didn't melt so well.
Then we began to get things right with a slightly elevated temperature on the iron.
A little too long in the ironing...
And perfection reached at last.
I'm not sure that I wouldn't have to feel out the temperature settings all over again if I tried this project in the future. The kids lost interest in arranging after awhile, so any more would likely not happen and doing it again would probably result with a similar pass/fail ratio. They are now taped in two strips in front of the window above the boys' table in the dining room.

The whole experiment made quite the mess (it is a shame we don't have more space here for all of our projects - it would solve so much) and I was all stressed out anyway, so this didn't really help. I also have a tendency to boss too much, which is problematic and likely why the kids lose interest in all my activities so quickly. I am working on my mood.