Crayon Ornaments

When you're a young family with kids, it's hard to have a Christmas tree that looks consistent. If you've been married for a few years before you had children you may have a bunch of really beautiful hand crafted ornaments that look very grown up. However, there's also a good chance that along with your first child you've started a collection of ornaments that consists of sesame street characters and handmade child-art.

Now, you certainly don't have enough of the children's ornaments to fill a whole tree, and it seems likely that your old decorating sensibilities will clash with the primary colors of your tiny tot's Hallmark collection. You want to put the kids ornaments on the tree, but you don't want to spend an arm and a leg buying new (fragile) glass balls and others to fill it out. What do you do?

We made some crayon ornaments with a new box of Crayola Crayons and some ornament hooks, and it was so easy that you can do it too.

You'll need three things:

1. Crayons
2. Christmas Ornament Hooks (Even though I used the green, coated hooks, I'd recommend the silver uncoated because you really shouldn't be melting plastic. These were just what I had. My penance for being bad is sharing this instructable with you.)
3. Lighter

I'd recommend buying a massive box. The one kids drool over that has colors in it like "Elvis' Jumpsuit Gold" and "Gulf of Mexico Brown". You'll have so many to choose from that you don't really need to worry about the colors you don't like (and you'll have leftovers for the kids to color with).

For the purpose of this demonstration, we've chosen two 24 packs.

Because you'll be needing them quickly, I'd suggest picking the specific colors you want to use before moving on to the next step.

Depending on the hooks you buy, you may need to bend them so you have one loop (which will be the top) and a straight end. Like a candy cane.

Take a single hook, and heat the straight end using the lighter. If you have a blowtorch style lighter, that's all the better. You want the metal to heat up pretty well.

Once you are satisfied with the temperature of the hook (too long and you'll start feeling the heat spreading to the area you're holding, maybe I should recommend gloves), you'll insert the heated end into the bottom of the crayon. The faster you do this, the better. You'll be less likely to split the crayon, and the wax will yield nicely. Then it will hardden around the hook. The bond is sturdy enough for the crayon to remain on the end without it slipping off while hung.

The title says it all. Keep going till you have enough to fill out the gaps in your tree.

Then hang them up.