Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Tutorial: Valentine's Day Crayons.

Here we are, my first tutorial. I guess I'll make it pretty simple. Valentine's day is coming up and if your chilren's school is anything like my neice's then you know how restricting the no-sweets rules can be. So here's another option: heart shaped crayons. they're super simple to make, and the kids can help too!
Valentine's Day Crayons.
Step one: Gather all your household's broken crayons. They don't have to be the same color or the same brand. Any will do!
Step two: Use an exacto knife to slit the wrappers lenthwise (adults only). Then pass the slit crayons to the kids so they can easily peel the wrappers off. Tip: use two gallon size ziplocs, one to collect the wrappers and one to collect the crayons.


Step three: sort by color (relatively). being sure to keep warm colors with warm and cool with cool. (so you won't end up with murky muddy looking crayons). Feel free to scribble a little with each one - you'd be surprised at how much those purples and blues look like black!
Step four: Break each whole crayon into 3-4 peices (depending on the size of broken ones they can be left alone or broken again).
Step five: nearly fill each section of a silicone heart shaped ice cube tray (found in a pack of two for $2.5o at target right now). Keep colors sorted by warm/cold tone.
Step six: carefully place full tray into microwave and turn on for about 5-7 minutes. Stopping periodically to check and poke with a toothpick (as per 9yr old's liking). Crayons should look shiny but with some solid looking parts remaining (for swirled crayon). Melting too much will give you a solid colored crayon and possibly some melting of your silicone tray.
Step seven: Carefully remove tray from microwave (adults only!) and place into freezer for several minutes. Remove from freezer when crayons are still a little warm - this makes it much easier to remove them from the tray.
Step eight: Remove crayons from tray and enjoy!





7 comments:

  1. Great tip in the target trays! Thanks!

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  2. This is so cool! Thanks for sharing!

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  3. I was going to try and figure this out for my 1 yo daughter who is always breaking (or nibbling on) her crayons. I was thinking chunky might be easier for her to work with. And I was just at target yesterday, oh well, I'll have to go back. Thanks for posting your experience so I don't have to experiment!

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  4. Yea! Do you think though I could put these trays in the oven, even though they're slated for freezer use??

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  5. I made some crayons using a mold similiar to yours. It left a white residue on the outside of the mold and stained the mold with the color of the crayons. Did yours do the same thing?

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  6. To Auntie Em - yes it did. I had had the trays around the house for about a year before finding a use for them so I figured it would be ok for them to be used only for melting crayons. Also, they may melt a bit if you leave them in the microwave too long. :)

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  7. Okay, that is great to know. I'll just use them for molds instead of food making. Thanks!

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