A wall artist
Your lovely little budding artist has presented you with a masterpiece on your painted wall. What are you going to do now? First of all, gather up all the crayons in the house, and keep them in one spot, that only YOU can control of. Provide a time for artist work to let your child express themselves on the proper medium. Let them know that coloring on anything except materials you provide, is a really bad idea.
Now that the common sense “Mom” advice is out of the way, here are some tips to get that crayon off the wall.
- From personal experience, I’ve found that WD-40 works great. Spray the WD-40 on an absorbent cloth and wipe very lightly on the stains. The WD-40 will actuall dissolve the waxy crayon. Just use a damp cloth to remove the residue! Don’t put too much WD-40 on the wall, to avoid it running down and streaking.
- Use a Mr. Clean magic eraser. This is a great method, but it may take a bunch of them and a lot of elbow grease. The plus side is, no unpleasant odor, and it’s perfectly safe.
- Orange-Glo cleaner. You can use the actual cleaner on a cloth, or buy the orange-glo cleaning cloths that are made for scrubbing with the cleaner made in them. This works as well as the WD-40, but smells a whole lot better.
- Some people have reported success using a blow dryer to soften up the crayon, and then wiping the residue away with a dryer sheet.
Prevention is the best cure for disasters like this, but children can be so ‘creative’, we need to be proactive! If the crayon won’t come off, no matter what, you can always rearrange the furniture to hide it or put a frame around it and pretend like it’s there on purpose.