Recycled Crayons

I haven’t talked about it much around here, but I’ve got a bit of a crafty streak in me that makes me want to try to make things most people don’t make. There’s plenty of things I can do, like knit and sew, but these activities aren’t particularly kid friendly what with the sharp pokey bits and the fast-moving sharp pokey bits and the sharp scissors and me really wanting to get my kid through childhood with all body parts intact. So anyways, I try to keep my eyes open for kid-friendly hands-on projects, and we tried one this week that was mostly kid-friendly that I thought I might share.

In a nutshell, we took all the broken and nubby crayons we had around, peeled all the paper off of them, broke them into tiny pieces, put them in silicone baking molds and melted them into the oven into new crayons that are WAY more fun to play with than the little nubs. There are tons of tutorials out there with variations on how to do this, but if you’ve got a baking mold you don’t mind never using for food again, crayons, and an oven that heats to 200 degrees you can basically do this project.

Sweet Girl had a blast peeling off the paper and breaking the crayons, then watching them melt. I did have her stand a safe distance back from the oven when I saw how very liquidy and spillable the wax was, and also because I may or may not have skimmed over the portions of the tutorials that said how hot the oven should be, and I may or may not have heated the oven to 350, and the crayons may or may not have been smoking by the time I pulled them out. My new crayons may or may not still be non-toxic after withstanding those temperatures. Ahem.

Anyways, here are the results of our little experiment! (Not the best photos due to crappy light in our house, but you get the idea.)

And a closer look at my favorite of the bunch.

So yeah, we’re totally making more of these to give to the cousins for Christmas.