When I was a little girl...

I made these really cool things out of crayola shavings and glue. And I did this inside my desk in third grade much to the chagrin (and repeated irritation) of my teacher.

I was lucky enough to have a mother who bought me the whole 64 pack of crayolas. I wanted this not so much for the variety of colors (though this was really cool) but because it came with a crayola sharpener that you could use to sharpen those pesky crayons when they got flat. There were 4 of us in the back corner (where the good kids sat) who had this awesome box and we would finish our work early and then start our craft projects. If we were lucky enough we would have construction paper, but more often than not, we just had to rely on whatever was handy--and that was often the insides of our desk.

So, this is how it worked. Before the system was perfected, each person would take their flattish crayons and sharpen them which would result in these really cool looking shavings. We would then squeeze a glob of glue about the size of the palm of our hands on the inside corner of our desk and then we'd open the bottom of the crayola box (carefully so that all the crayons didn't go all over the floor) and empty the shavings onto a sheet of notebook paper. Then we'd sprinkle the shavings onto the glue and wait and wait for it to dry. Once dry, we peeled the whole thing up and took it outside to look at with the sun in its background. I'm sure we dropped them after that and proceeded to make more.

We figured out pretty early on, though, that a mix of colors really just looked brown or black and we needed better organization than that, so we would pool all our similar colored crayons with different people and they would shave until we all had several piles of color. Then we'd use these piles to create ART. We could make flowers, birds, skies, whatever. The globs of glue in the bottom of our desk were worked with a bit before we dropped the shavings onto them to make them look like something. Our little factory could put out at least one "painting" a day if we weren't too terribly busy with classwork.

That is until we got caught. Mrs. Lucas was a stickler for a clean room and well-behaved children, and I'm sure that 4-6 smart kids in the back of the room working together on a craft project weren't all that neat or well-behaved (I can see all the smears of crayon shavings on the floor even as I type, not to mention the metal that had to have been ripped out of the insides of our desks). She put a halt to this factory of activity not only by taking up our crayons, but also by telling our parents. I remember my mother being so angry at me for "wasting" my crayons by shaving them for art and not just coloring with them.

After that I was limited to the 48 crayola box, which while still having all the wonderful colors, didn't have the sharpener. Mom didn't understand that the pencil sharpener didn't shave crayolas the same...or maybe she didn't care...but at some point someone, who was also limited to the 48 crayola box at school, managed to get a 64 crayola box at home, ripped out the sharpener, and the little rebel factory was in business once again. I'm fairly sure this is why I ended up getting sent to stand in the hallway one day where I cried and cried so loud that the special ed teacher invited me into her room to help her out so I wouldn't disturb her students anymore. That's another story, though.