Homemade Recycled Crayons

Birthday parties mean an activity or craft for us.

Rather than give goodie bags, we make a craft with the kids that they can bring home.  

Our daughter loves to draw and color, so for her 5th birthday we made crayons - super easy, fun, and quite beautiful too.

The only hard part of this craft, is to collect all the broken crayon bits for about six months before the party.  Needless to say, I failed, and you can see some whole crayons in the bowl that we used.

Both the boys and the girls enjoyed this activity - they ranged from 4-7 years old.



Materials needed:

• Cheap silicon bake trays from Ikea or similar shops
• Broken bits of crayons (we love washable Crayola)
• An oven heated to 125 C / 250 F

Steps:

• Peel and break the crayons and put into a large bowl (You could opt to color coordinate them in smaller bowls, but I prefer the kids to do the hard work!)
• Prepare two baking trays covered in foil - to protect from spills
  
• Preheat oven to 125-150 C / 250-300 F (if your oven runs cooler or hotter)
  
• Have the kids each pick colors and fill up XX number of shapes depending on number of kids and trays
  
• Put trays in oven for about 15-20 minutes - check every 5 minutes at first, then watch until they are all melted
  
• Remove from oven and cool on a rack
  

By the end of the party they should be cool and you can pop out and put in little bags or boxes for each child to take home the ones they made.

** Note: the stars were harder to pop out of the molds, and some tips broke, the hearts were really easy.  

** Note: I use these silicon trays ONLY for crafts, and not for cooking, they don't get perfectly clean after this, and I don't want to contaminate any foods I make.  So do be aware of this, and aim for cheap or old ones to dedicate for crafts.

---