Recycling Old Crayons into New Crayons (Take 1)

I was browsing online for homemade gift ideas for little ones and saw this neat way to recycle your broken crayons. I know that my kids tend to snap their crayons pretty easily and we end up with all of those half crayons or bits of crayons. Their little hands already have to work to hold the crayons so I love the idea of them having something bigger to hold onto while getting rid of the clutter of the broken crayons. It is also a great way to use up restaurant crayons that the kids bring home. They always have the same 4 colors and how many of those do you really need? Here is the site that I got the idea from: Homemade crayons.

Some of the ways that I had to modify that explanation was by setting my oven to 170 instead of 150 because that was the lowest temperature on mine. I found that it actually took WAY LONGER (40 + minutes and they still weren't fully melted) and this was after I upped the temperature even more. This site suggests using old muffin tins (don't put crayon in ones you are planning to bake with again!) but I used some cookie cutters that I wasn't planning to bake with instead. I lined a cake pan with foil and put the tin cookie cutters right down on the foil and then filled them with bits of cut up crayon.

The problem I ran into doing it this way was that the melted crayon (I didn't expect it to be so watery) was coming out under the cutters. So I would recommend maybe folding some foil up over the sides of the cookie cutter to make a mold. I will have to try that next time to see if it works better. Either that or I will put some foil in my muffin tins and go that route. Here is what they looked like when they came out of the oven (this was after they had already begun to cool but you can see the crayon that had leaked all over the foil and how they weren't fully melted still):

They cooled quickly and the one on the left was pretty when popped out but just too thin to use without breaking.

I did some more digging online and found a different way to do it ( Recycling crayons ). I am going to try this next time and re-post, hopefully with a more successful story!