On Tuesday, 12/20, at Martin School our awesome MELC great held a craft night! As part of that craft night we made our best attempt at doing some wax paper to wood transfer crafts. It was something I had done at home in the past and thought it would be great to do it with a larger group.
It was a blast! Even with several parents stepping up to help out (Thank You!), there were some process efficiencies identified for the next go around! Due to some families not having the opportunity to complete their craft, I am writing this up to provide 1) high level instructions and 2) the images that you can use to do this craft at home!
NOTE: Several images were found via standard searches in google. all credit goes back to the owners of those images with respect to commercial rights, etc.
Send an email to Mark at mstiner@gmail.com if you have any questions!
An example of a completed project!
Here are some high level instructions for applying wax paper transfers onto wood.
- View the images below and download the reverse print of the one(s) you like!
- Cut a piece of wax paper slightly bigger than a piece of 8.5×11 printer paper
- fold the wax paper around a piece of printer paper and tape the wax paper to the back. This should give you a wax paper print surface that is exactly the size of a piece of paper which should feed into your printer well.
- Put the paper into your manual feed tray of your inkjet printer
- Open the image up with your standard windows or mac software. Print the image and depending on your size need, ensure you either do or do not scale the image. The images below print well at 100% scale for the artwork we had done at the school.
- arrange your wood on a table
- place the wax paper, print down onto the wood. DO NOT allow the print to slide or move on the wood.
- While holding it securely in place, use your fingers, a credit card or something else to apply pressure to work the ink into the wood. The more and harder you rub the better the image will transfer.
Notes:
An inkjet printer is required. A laserjet printer will not work from my understanding.
A softer wood like pine will absorb the ink much better than a harder wood like oak.
Have fun!!
Images. For wax paper transfer, download the reverse print version!
