Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Making Crayons

Last week Chloe Jo and I made crayons. We loved doing this and CJ loves her new round multi-color crayons. Here is how we did this:
The supplies you will need are:
a box of crayons (new or old)
a muffin pan
I ended up also using a knife and a cutting board
The first thing you need to do is unwrap the crayons. At first we were just peeling the paper off. That ended up not being very easy and CJ got bored with it quickly. I ended up slicing the paper with the knife on the cutting bored and it came off much easier and quicker. The downfall to this is that you have to be extremely cautious about this because the crayons are round and it is super easy to slip and cut yourself. If you push the knife into the crayons a little it works better. Some paper still didn't come off easy after that, but the majority slipped right off.
After you are done taking the papers off, you need to break the crayons up in little pieces.
Chloe Jo loved this step because it was easy for her to do. The puzzle in the picture is what she decided to do while I took the papers off of the crayons. She loves that puzzle.
I tried to break each crayon into four pieces to make them small enough. If I had used a larger muffin tin (I used a mini-muffin tin) I would have left them in bigger pieces. It just depends on your tin.
Drop a handful of crayon pieces into each muffin mold.
Put it in 300 degree oven until they are completely melted. I left mine in for about 8 minutes.
Let them cool completely and then pop them out. I did this like I would an ice mold.
And Wah-la! You now have round multi-colored crayons to color with to your hearts content!

This was a sort of trial run for us. I used the mini muffin tin because that is what I had on hand. I think it would be super fun to do this with heart shaped tins or leaf shaped tins. The possibilities are endless!

1 comment:

Angie said...

Now I know what to do with my left over crayons at the end of the year! Love this!