Shamrock Sun Catchers

Today is a beautiful sunny day in March, and I started thinking about our Shamrock sun catchers we did last year during a spring storm, and how we should attempt to make some more this year.  We got the idea from the blog Serving Pink Lemonade and you can find the full instructions below.  This is not only a fun, hands-on craft but it is a great way to use up all the tiny, old, or broken crayons in your collection.

Pretty shamrock sun catchers

 All you need for this project is:

Wax paper
hand held pencil/crayon sharpener
crayon shavings
iron
thin towel for pressing
shamrock pattern
sharpie/pencil
scissors
tape or string 

We had Mr. D help us "shave" the crayons.  We found all the left over broken ones, and we tried to find as many shades of green as we could, from dark, to medium, to lime.  Using a hand held pencil sharpener we made little piles of each color.

Here's our left over nubs when we were through

 After that you want a longer piece of wax paper.  Find your small fry (or other assorted willing participants) and start sprinkling the crayon shavings however you would like.  We tried to leave a little space around the edges to help seal everything together in a minute.

Take another piece of wax paper about the same size and gently lay it directly over your first piece.

It's a waxy crayon shaving sandwich.

Next comes the warm iron.  We had ours set on medium to low, you might have to play with your settings, but you do not want the iron too hot, but does need to be warm enough to melt the crayons between the layers though.  You do not want to iron directly on the wax paper, so get a thin towel or dish towel to place on top of the two layers of wax paper and press your iron on that.

Mr. D actually irons better than me, so we "elected" him for this part

Press gently and make sure you cover the whole area underneath.  When you are finished you might get a few gasps as you peel away the towel to reveal this underneath:

Oo pretty green wax smudges

Let this cool completely and then you can get your shamrock template out.  I simply googled "shamrock shapes" or "shamrock coloring pages" and a bunch popped up.  I printed up the best ones on thicker card stock, and we cut out a few different sizes, some large and a few medium ones. Then, with the same idea that you would use for sugar cookies, we arranged the templates out where the most would fit in the allowed space and traced with a sharpie.

Simply cut them out carefully after that and you can hang them by fishing line or string in any window.  We decided to hang them in our front window using regular scotch tape, which was less time consuming.

We happened to make 20 shamrocks when we realized our front window had twenty squares to fill.  How perfect is that?  They were really bright and festive and, like snowflakes, no two turned out exactly alike

 Pretty!

 
Our little kitty Haley liked them so much she sat in the window for quite awhile admiring our handy work.

kitty and clovers

And the luck of the Irish must have been with us, because no sooner had we put up the shamrocks, the sun came out behind the storm and out came a rainbow!

a happy rainbow smiling down on our Irish art

 It was a very lovely one too!

So grab a kid or a grandkid or two this weekend and have some fun making these cute little sun catchers.  By the way, you can switch up the colors and make these for any holiday.  Think pink and red hearts for Valentine's Day, pastel flowers, crosses, bunnies, and eggs for Easter, etc.  Anyway, have FUN!