Making your own crayons are an easy and fun activity to do with your littles and it's another way to repurpose all of the broken crayons in your little one's crayon box. This activity takes old (or new) crayons, melts them down in the oven using silicone molds and the results are fun colorful crayons for your little ones to use, give as favors for birthdays or holidays and so much more!
Since Valentine's Day is coming up, we decided to use heart shaped molds for ours! These will make great favors for little one's to give to their classmates and friends.
For the activity, all you need are crayons, silicone candy molds, cookie sheet and an oven.
First, we preheated our oven to 275° degrees. Next, we gathered our crayons - we chose colors that kept in theme for Valentine's Day - and peeled off the wrappers. It took a little bit of time but it was easy and used the time to practice colors and counting in the process. Once we had all of our crayon wrappers peeled, it was time to break the crayons down. If you're using already broken crayons you may be able to skip this step, but we broke our crayons in mostly 3-4 pieces.
Once had had all of our crayons broken down, it was time to place them in the molds. We placed our silicone candy molds on top of a cookie sheet to make the transfer in and out of the oven easier and avoid any spilling. We filled our silicone molds with alternating colors, you could also make solid color crayons in your molds, and once they were all filled into the oven they went. Depending on the size of the mold that you are using, you will adjust how many crayon pieces used.
The crayons should melt pretty quickly so be sure to keep a close look while they are in the oven. Remember to consider your oven, the size of the molds etc. We baked ours for about 16 minutes until they were fully melted. When fully melted we removed from the oven and let the molds cool. Once completely cooled, (we left ours overnight) we popped our crayons out.
The end result was beautiful heart shaped crayons with swirls of colors in red, pink, white and orange.
DIY Crayons - What You'll Need:
- Crayons - you could use your little one's crayons that are broken and maybe you were ready to throw out; We wanted to use certain colors and didn't have enough so we purchased a box of individual colors (linked here)
- Silicone candy molds - we used a small heart mold (linked here) and a heart gem mold we had but found a similar one (linked here)
- Cookie sheet (here)
- Oven
Steps:
- Preheat your oven. We set ours to 275° degrees.
- Gather all of your crayons and peel all of the wrappers off. You can use as many colors as you'd like. Since we made ours for Valentine's Day we chose pinks, red, white and orange.
- Once you've peeled all of the crayon wrappers, break the crayons into smaller pieces. We broke each crayon into about 3-4 pieces.
- Place the silicone molds on top of the cookie sheet and fill the silicone molds up with the broken crayon pieces.
- Once you've filled the molds with your crayons, place in the oven and let the crayons melt. We left ours in the oven for about 16 minutes but checked constantly and removed once the crayons were completely melted.
- Remove from the oven, let set and remove the crayons from mold once completely cool. We waited overnight to remove.
- Enjoy your new crayons!
Have fun and share with us! #LOCreativeCircle #mylittleowly
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