The Crayola Factory

This weekend my parents are visiting us and while my dad and Andrew did some Home Depot errands and work around the house today, my mom and I took the kids out for the afternoon. We went to lunch and then took them to The Crayola Factory in Easton, PA. What a fun place! I have never been there personally and have wanted to take the kids for the past few months. So, we decided it would be the perfect indoor activity for this cold weekend.

Ben was very cute as we prepared him for our trip. We kept telling him that we were going to see where the crayons live and he seemed genuinely excited by the time we arrived. In fact, the very first thing we saw from our parking garage was this statue. What a fun welcome!


If you have never been to The Crayola Factory, it is basically a hands-on discovery museum revolving around...Crayola products! They have exhibits that show how crayons are made and the hisotry of the crayon, etc. We, however, centered our trip on the interactive portion of the factory: the projects. They have various rooms where the kids can turn in tokens to receive Crayola products to take home and also many different craft stations where projects can be done using many of Crayola's products. There are projects that are suitable for children as young as two and others that are a bit more advanced so assistance is required. Ben did not do every single activity since he seemed to be content focusing on his favorites. There definitely was no shortage of things to do and we were there for about three hours.


Here's Ben at the Color Wonder station, coloring pictures of his favorites: Tow Mater and Lightening McQueen.


He had a fun time putting his tokens into the various vending machines that hand out free crayons and markers to take home...and proudly showed off all of his loot to me and Nana!

Nate was too young to participate in the projects but, as usual, he was Mr. Content for the entire trip and just looked around, asked "What dat?" while pointing to everything we passed and smiled the whole time. Even without a nap. Here he is with Nana at The Meltdown. We didn't do this activity this time since it was fairly crowded (and next door to Ben's favorite station...so he got distracted anyways). I hear it involves melting wax to create your own custom crayon block of various colors. Next time!

And we have arrived at the Model Magic station. This was by far Ben's favorite stop of all. We spent over an hour here while he shaped, cut, rolled, crafted and colored the white modeling clay. He loves Play Doh so I figured he would enjoy this one the best.

Nate being happy and observing everything. What a character he has become, always making silly faces and doing things to make us laugh!

Something we did was apparently very funny!

Our next stop was the Creative Studio, where Ben made several of the crafts. Here, he is using a blue glue stick and some scissors to build a triarama (remember those diaramas we always had to make in elementary school? Well, they're baaaack...).

Unfortunately his project didn't quite make it into our craft baggie to bring home. Ben got a little, eh, carried away with the scissors and decided to hone in on his cutting skills after glueing only a few pieces of paper down. As for me, it's tough work teaching a lefty to use scissors! Andrew already has nightmares about teaching Ben to bat lefty and play golf with left-handed clubs :)

Baba break! Isn't Nate the cutest when he holds his own "baba"? Words can't even explain just how excited he gets when he sees it coming!

Finally, we went into the Easton Press and Bindery and did two projects. The first is a mask of his head and the second is a paint project. Here's Ben making his mask:

And the mess begins! Here, Nana is helping Ben use a brayer to paint a paper with blue paint. After painting, his paper is lifted up and a design can be seen from indentations on the mold we had placed underneath his paper.

Cleaning up...by himself, of course, even though Nana had started out helping. He prefers to exert his independence lately and do things alone, claiming "Ben's big now" and then proceeding to do whatever it is he wants to do solo.

After he painted, Ben had to put his paper into the drying oven and once dry, it was time to color it with crayons. What a fun project and luckily the washable paints were used! (