Recycling Old Crayons into New Crayons (Take 2)

For those of you who read my first post, Take 1, you know that the homemade crayon thing didn't quite work out as planned. Determined to make this work, I gave it another go using this website for a guide: Recycling Crayons.  I found this method to work much better for me. First of all, it took a fraction of the time the other method did. That's always a plus in my book!

Let's break this down. First I chose my colors, peeling off the paper and sorting them in cleaned and dried tin cans.

I then lined a muffin tin with foil.

To melt the crayons I created a double boiler, filling a pot with water and placing one of the cans into it. I got the water boiling and let it stay in there until the crayons were melted.

I will say that I think the brand of crayon makes a difference. Since I was using ones that we had accumulated from various restaurants, I noticed that some melted instantly and some had to be broken down with the spoon. The later did not ever fully melt and made things chunky. I think this is why it took so long in the oven on my first attempt. Once melted, I removed the can from the pot and let it cool slightly.

I then used a plastic spoon to make a layer of yellow.

I did the same with green and blue.

I then let it cool (this takes no time at all) and then removed the foil from the muffin tin and took my crayon off. You will notice that the surface is bumpy from the foil and that the green didn't really show up, I should have made a bigger layer of that.

I will say the idea of doing it in the oven still appeals to me because you can get a variety of colors all at once, which I thought turned out pretty in my first attempt. I think it would just be better to go the route of using a muffin tin and making sure you have the kind of crayons that will melt properly. Buying a cheap muffin tin specifically for this wouldn't be a bad idea either because then you could ditch the foil and have a smoother crayon. I think this second method is great for layering colors and creating themes, like red white and blue for July 4th, etc. You definitely have much more control doing it this way.

Happy crayon making! Let me know if you try this and have any other helpful tips or come up with some better creations.

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!