Recycled Crayons {Valentine's Day}

At the beginning of my daughter's first year of preschool, I was eager to sign up to help out with the holiday parties in her classroom and to be able to send treats on those special days!  As the year has progressed and I've discovered just how much candy and junk food comes home after these parties, I really changed my tune.  I decided I really wanted to find a non-candy Valentine for her to share with her classmates.  I couldn't be more thrilled with how these turned out and I know the kids will enjoy these!  Although some of it had to be done by me, there were steps that even at age 3, she was able to help with!  She is so excited to share these with her school friends!

You will need lots of old crayons in a variety of colors, a sharp knife for cutting through the papers on the crayons and a silicon baking mold.  I wish I could be more specific on how many crayons.  I can tell you that what you see pictured in the muffin tin did about 12 crayons. . .

Start by removing the wrappers from the crayons.  I used a knife to cut down the length of the wrapper (be very careful).  In most cases, it peeled right off.  Others took a little more time to get that wrapper off.  Break the crayons into smaller pieces.  I used a muffin tin and we sorted the colors.  This was very helpful so that my daughter could take it one color at a time and we knew each crayon would have all the colors.  

 Bake in an oven proof mold.  This is a silicon mold that I purchased at Hobby Lobby for about $4.

 Place the broken crayons in the mold.  We filled the cups level with the top of the mold.

 Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

 Place mold on cookie sheet- IMPORTANT!  Place in oven for about 20-30 minutes or until crayons are melted.  Mine took about 30 minutes, but I started watching them at 20 minutes.

 When crayons are melted, remove from oven (carefully) and allow to cool.  When the crayons have started turning solid and your pan is warm and not hot, you can set them in the refrigerator to cool.  When the bottoms of the cups are completely cool, you can remove the crayons from the molds.  I had expected that these would just pop out, but they didn't.  I had to pry them out a bit.  The silicon is flexible and I had to peel the mold away from the crayon.  I did three batches of these and it was that way with every batch.  (Note:  I tried cooling the first batch in the freezer.  I wouldn't recommend this as it may result in cracked crayons!)  Cracked crayons can be remelted, but I wish I had just used the fridge to cool!

 Tip:  Be sure to put some of those bright colors (pink, yellow, orange, white) at the bottoms of the cups as that will be the front of your crayon.  I found those colors really popped against the darker colors!

 Finished product!  Fun little project!

 I put our crayons in clear treat bags with a card I made using Word on my computer- nothing fancy!

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