My little ones love coloring and crayons, but unfortunately their favorite thing to do with crayons in to peel off the paper and break them into little unusable bits. After reducing our full crayon box to a few little bits and pieces knocking around, I decided something must be done. Since depriving my kids (even little ones) of art materials isn't an option; what we needed was a toddler friendly crayon. The answer? Big chunky crayons with no paper wrappers. It took me awhile to think of what I could use for a mold, since I wanted block crayons, not circular like you would get by using a muffin tin, and then finally it hit me; my ice cube tray! I never use it anyway; the only reason I bought it was to freeze homemade baby food, which I'm not doing anymore. Well, I thought since it was plastic that I could just put broken bits of crayon in the tray, and microwave it. It turns out that crayons are impervious to microwaves. Who knew? So I had to melt them first, then pour the wax into the mold. I love the way they turned out! They're very smooth and fun to hold, and are really great for coloring in large areas. The twins love them, and they haven't tried eating them yet!
These are beautiful! How did you melt them?
ReplyDeleteI used a small sauce pan under very low heat. In order to be able to melt one batch after another without having to wipe out the pan, I first melted yellow, then orange, red, purple, blue, and green. The green crayon is half blue since I didn't have very many green stubs.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I'd like to give these as gifts this Christmas!
ReplyDelete