Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Day 36- Crayons


 Who doesn't have as many broken crayons in boxes as they do whole crayons??  I have been saving broken crayons for a long time for a day just like today.  I even had the heart shaped ice cube tray sitting around knowing that I wanted to use it for making crayons... actually, I found it in the bottom of a box in the basement or garage and brought it in and threw it in the dishwasher.  When it came out, it was all bent and Mike goes "I see you lost an ice cube tray."  I looked at him and said "Why?" and he tells me, "it got all bent out of shape in the dishwasher."  I just laughed and told him that I didn't care because it was for crayons anyway haha.  It is a good thing I didn't care about that tray too, because it was coated in crayon when it came out of the oven... but more on that later.

This could be one of the easiest crafts, most interactive, and fun crafts we have done to date.  The kids helped rip the paper off the crayons that had paper left... Iris went through a phase that she did NOT want paper on the crayons when she was much littler.  Then I cut the the crayons into very small pieces.  Once we had all of our pieces cut, we began filling the ice cube tray with crayon pieces... if you decide to do this at home, you can also use silicon cupcake molds, but only fill them about 1/3-1/2 of the way.

After they were filled, we stuck them in a 230* oven for 45 minutes.. if you use cupcakes molds, you will need about an hour... until everything was melted.  Once they come out of the oven, let them cool for an hour or so, pop them out of the molds, and instant crayons!












We really enjoyed coloring with them before dinner time today too.

2 comments:

  1. Great idea.....I'll pass this one on....Now, do they use them as heart shaped crayons ? Neat....

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    1. We were using them as crayons all night :) They are a lot of fun. Crayola melts better... the cheapo- RoseArt/dollar store/restaurant crayons melted weird.. the ones with a lot of the cheap crayons had a film of clear wax on the top of the molds after they dried, can't explain it. But I know that I have always preferred Crayola.

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