Crayon Makeover

I like to encourage as much creativity around here as I can, which means go through what seems like an extrordinary amount of crayons. We've been building quite the collection of broken crayons, and I finally found something to do with them. We gave all our old broken crayon pieces a makeover, and made them better than new!

To start with you'll need to gather the following supplies:

--All the broken crayons

--A mold (we used soap molds, but you could use candy molds--as long as you don't plan on using it for food again!)

--Scissors (or some sort of tool to break the crayons into smaller pieces)

--Oven

Once you have all of your crayons together, rip off all the wrappers and sort them by colors. Then with an adults help cut the crayons into smaller pieces, so they will melt easier. Preheat your oven to about 150 degrees or as low as it can go. (Our oven would only go as low as 170 degrees.)  Now that our pieces are small, its time to put them in our mold. When designing your crayons, remember that you want them to be at least a crayon width thick. The thicker the crayon the sturdier. My kids had fun deciding what they wanted their crayons to look like. We decided we wanted bright multicolored crayons, but you could decide to make solid colored ones. Now stick your crayon filled molds into the oven and wait for the crayons to melt. It took our crayons about 30 minutes to melt together. The time totally depends on the size of your crayon pieces, the temperature of your oven, the shape of your mold, etc. So watch your crayons carefully! When they look melted, carefully take the molds out of the oven and set them out while they cool and harden. When they are dry and hardened go ahead and pop them out of the molds. Then you are ready to color with your new creations! Here are a few of ours...

I think they turned out pretty cute! The lighting wasn't the best in the photos, but you get the idea. My kids have loved them, and we will definitely be trying this again.