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Over the weekend we decided to make crayons! Like I mentioned in my previous post, I had been wanting to make shaped crayons like this blogger did.
I used to have fun shaped silicone molds, but they seem to have disappeared. I suspect they were donated during one of my massive cleaning sessions! Luckily I found an awesome bunny mold at Target, which I thought would be perfect since Easter is coming up.
On Sunday morning, we gathered all of our old and broken crayons and got to work. My husband made a slit in the paper, I peeled the paper off and Lucas broke the crayons into smaller pieces.
Lucas took the wrapper off the mold and got it all ready for us. Then, we let Lucas put the crayons into the molds, which he enjoyed. He wanted to put one crayon in each mold, so we had to talk him into mixing them up.
It was kind of difficult to explain to a two year old that we were going to bake in the oven crayons, but we tried. We had the oven set at 250 degrees and ended up having the crayons in the oven for about 15 minutes. Make It and Love It says they only take 5-10 minutes, but mine were so not done. I thought it would be hard to tell when they were done, but it was super easy to tell. Oh, and I put tin foil on the rack below so that we could contain any drips.
After they came out of the oven, I put them in the freezer so that they would cool quickly. Again I put down tin foil since I didn’t want a freezer full of spilled crayons. My husband took them out of the oven and said they spilled a bit, but it just made some molds fuller than others. I’m not sure what the right way to handle silicone molds is? They are so unsteady.
Once the crayons were cooled and solid, I took then out of the freezer and ran hot water on the back of the mold to help get them out. The crayons turned out great! Since the broken pieces were all different sizes and we didn’t exactly equally fill the molds (and since there was a little spill), we had some crayons that were thick and some that were thin. And they worked great! It’s like having 10 colors of crayons in one. And it’s a great way to repurpose old icky broken crayons that would head for the trash anyways.
Things I learned / tips:
- It’s harder to peel the wrappers off crayons than it seems.
- If you put crayons in a white bowl, it will be nearly impossible to get said bowl clean.
- Dark colors don’t work as well. Next time I will skip the black, brown and dark blue crayons. They overwhelm the other colors.
- Never throw anything away. You never know when you will need those $0.99 silicone molds in fun shapes you bought at IKEA 10 years ago.
Did you do any fun projects over the weekend?? Please share!!
