Crayon Craft

February 24, 2011

First of all, I am really, really bummed because I lost like 30 photos from this craft. I'm not sure what happened to the settings on my camera but they were wrong and the pictures went black. So... I deleted them thinking they were pictures of the boys painting from an earlier post (and upload to the computer). I deleted almost all of the pictures and I of course, took pictures of the entire messy process. Anyhow, this craft will not be repeated for quite some time but I'll let you know what the steps were and you'll just have to do the visualizing on you own.

So, I saw this on a crafting blog that I read and I thought it would be a perfect activity for a day when Ryan was off from school. Valentine's Day was a furlough day so I picked that as our day to roll up our sleeves and really get down and dirty for this lovely craft. It took well over an hour and was a fun activity for the boys. I really quite enjoyed it as well. I think I know what changes I'll make for next time too.

So if you have kids you know how many crayons they come with. We've got all sorts of crayons and thanks to Evan a lot of them are broken. Now that we're really doing homework with lots of art projects and such, we're using the crayons enough to have to roll them down. This is where this craft comes in really handy.

The basic steps are:
1. peel all of your extra and broken crayons
2. break them into small pieces
3. have your children sort them into different cups by color
4. melt them (I put mine in a bowl of water in the microwave)
5. pour them into molds
6. let each layer cool before pouring in another layer
7. pop them out and enjoy writing with your rainbow crayons

We used a variety of molds, all of them were ice cube trays from IKEA. Next time I think I'd only use one mold though because it became a bit too much.