Carpenter Pete Brown felt compelled to make a special version of a vase, using wax instead of ceramic. While a proper vase requires a kiln and colored glazed to properly complete, Pete took some colorful inspiration from crayons. After one attempt with cheap crayons produced sub-optimal results, Pete moved on to working with the long-treasured Crayola brand crayons as they are composed of a superior grade of wax. Realizing that the paper wrappings could get in the way of his art project, Pete prepped his crayons by freezing them. Freezing the crayons rendered the wax stiff and dry enough to simply slide the paper off in one go.
After removing the paper from each crayon out of his four boxes and divvying them up by the color spectrum, Pete places a total of 256 crayons within a large rectangular mold, layering them according to their general closeness to red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet. After checking Crayola’s website for a melting point, Pete leaves the tray of crayons in a craft oven for three hours at 135° Fahrenheit, or slightly over 57° Celsius in metric.
After several days of allowing the collection of wax plenty of time to cool, and to minimize the chance of causing a massive explosion of molten wax from prematurely interacting with it, Pete removes his brick from the oven and its mold, brings the wax chunk over to a band saw in order to shape the edges into right angles then takes it to a drill press in order to bore out a hole for the vase. Pete completes his prismatic art piece by bringing the bored chunk of wax over to a lathe, melts one end just enough to give him a good contact grip after it cools down, activates the device and then uses a straight-edged sculpting blade to carve the general shape of the vase as a rainbow-colored array of wax chunks and flecks spray toward him. Once he’s satisfied with the vase’s shape, Mr. Brown uses a hand saw to remove the vase from its contact base and then evens out the bottom by rubbing the it into a perfectly flat and level surface.
The end result of Pete’s artistic endeavors is a gorgeous-looking vase and a shop floor that looks like it was covered in ice cream sprinkles. While the vase seemed perfectly fine as it was, Pete commented how a coating of resin would likely improve and preserve the vase; resin has a significantly higher melting point than crayon wax and would serve as an insulator for the wax within. Hypothetically, an extremely hot day could modify the vase to appear like a lava lamp, shifting its color patterns within its resin shell.