Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Valentine's Day craft....recycled crayons!

For months we have been using well-used, broken, and scraps of crayons and when Target put out their Valentine's stuff in the dollar aisle, I saw a silicon heart-shaped muffin pan that I knew would be perfect for "up-cycling" our dwindling crayon supply.

The hardest part of this project was peeling all the crayons!!  Not always easy for my 2 and 4 year old girls so this was primarily my job.  We did this project 2 weeks ago and I think I still have crayon wax embedded under my nails!  The best part of the project (in Greta's world) was breaking the bigger crayons into smaller pieces.  I am a little nervous now about introducing a brand-new box of crayons to the little destroyer.....I have a feeling they won't survive long!

This activity was great for sorting colors.  You can definitely just melt a rainbow of colors together but we wanted to maintain individual color families.....so the prep was great practice for both girls.  I read a couple of how-to's on recycling crayons in this way but it seemed the directions varied a lot so I assumed it would be pretty hard to mess it up.  So we filled the muffin pans with the pieces of broken crayons and I think I ended up baking them about 20 minutes at 200 degrees.  I also was impatient at waiting for them to cool so I popped them into the freezer to quicken the process.

The results were great!  And such a fun little Valentine gift for their friends.











Get Your Craft On
Made By You Monday
Making the World Cuter
Creative Juices
Red Ted Art 
Someday Crafts 
Virtual Valentine's Day Party

12 comments:

  1. so cute! A tip that helped me with the crayon peeling was to take an exacto knife (only an adult, of course) and run it down the length of the crayon. The wrapper is much easier to peel off using the slit as the starting point.

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  2. Oooh your crayons turned out beautifully!! Perfect for this time of year. We are yet to recycle our crayons - but am certainly building up a stash!!

    Maggy
    (Thanks for linking up!)

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  3. They turned out great! I have not jumped into the crayon making yet, but I think I need to try it! Kerri

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  4. We have yet to try making our own crayons, but yours are beautiful. They look perfect for little fingers too.

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  5. Thanks so much for this simple explanation! I used silicone heart molds that I picked up at Ikea and the 20 minutes was perfect for melting my crayons down into heart crayons!

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  6. Also, if you soak the crayons in water for a few minutes, the wrappers come right off. The exacto knife idea worked well too. We made letters that spelled out everyone's name for party favors at Reagan's birthday.

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  7. Thanks for the tips! Soaking them in water is a great idea!

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  8. Thanks for sharing this great idea!
    Lowri
    http://papervinenz.blogspot.com/

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  9. I have that muffin tin! The crayons are so cute.

    Thank you so much for linking to the Virtual Valentine’s Day Party on my blog. Please take a moment between now and the end of the party Monday night to visit a few of the other party guests. I would love to everyone who linked up to have other guests stop by for a visit.

    Remember if you visit two guests and leave me a comment that you did you could win a $15 Visa Gift Card.

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  10. Awesome! I found your post on JDaniel's, I'm going to try this with my daughter! Thank you!

    Was it easy to clean the muffin pans after this activity? I want to know if I can still use them for baking after an activity like this.

    ~Rockabye Butterfly~

    http://rockabyebutterfly.blogspot.com/

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  11. Have to try them out next year! Visiting from JDaneil4's party

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  12. What a great idea! These look super cute. I have so many extra crayons that aren't being used because they are little stumps & this is a great way to fix that.

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