Recycled Crayons- Gift Idea

Day 13

I initially got this idea from a book of preschool arts and crafts ideas and I've seen it on a few blogs lately as well. Every blog post I've seen has started out with brand new crayons though! Brand new crayons! Don't you people have used crayons?! Seriously?!

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This is how we made recycled star crayons.

First, the girls and I went through our big old container of crayons of every sort, taking all the broken ones out to use. Then we sorted them by color, testing the wrapperless ones on a sheet of scratch paper (to figure out the color if it wasn't obvious), and removing the wrappings from the others. I made a ziploc bag for each color and wrote the color on the outside. There were variations of each color and some crayons could have gone in more than one bag, so just use your best judgement. I liked them all to have a bit of variation.

I used a silicone cupcake pan I got at Michael's (with a 50% off coupon!) to make the new crayons. I've also made circles in a regular muffin tin before too. The kids helped me break up the bigger pieces and put them in the pan. I made each well a different color. You could also use multiple colors in each well to make rainbow crayons.

I preheated the oven to 350 and put the silicone pan on a cookie sheet (per the instructions it came with). I baked the crayons until they were mostly liquid, but with some crayon shapes left in the middle.

You could totally liquify them and mix them for a consistent color, but I like the variation. If you bake them too long, the wax kind of separates and they end up kind of two-toned.

Let the crayons cool completely and then pop them out and put them in a cute little package.

Along with the crayons, I'm giving some coloring pages made from pictures we took. You can also find lots of free coloring pages online.